


put to rest

by Naolin



Series: sink and swim [1]
Category: Oxenfree
Genre: College Sucks, F/M, Step-Sibling Incest, bullshit ghost magic, dealing with death?, millenial problems, shoujo bullshit, some minor ghost adventures
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-31
Updated: 2017-05-31
Packaged: 2018-11-07 06:34:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 39,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11053332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naolin/pseuds/Naolin
Summary: In which Alex gets out with extras, but not all the ones she wanted.





	put to rest

It's easy, really. She just – pulls herself out.  
  
It's a matter of turning on her heel. After all that time pulling things into this vortex, tugging whole rooms forward until they are shiny and new around her. She just has to look at it another way. Instead of radios through their own waves and armoires into water pools, Alex wants to move _herself_ instead.  
  
She doesn't think she was going about it wrong for all those years – she doesn't want to think about _just_ how many. She doesn't want to think of them as a wash. That line of thinking gets real depressing real fast, and this sort of despair could be a bottomless pit. So instead she thinks: you can't jump from the tower if you don't build it first.  
  
Or something. It's like a craft she needed to master. At a glance it looks easy, but that comes from practice.  
  
Sometimes she thinks – and she does not mean this to sound as conceited as it does – but maybe she is the center of the universe. Maybe just this one. Or maybe by being removed from it, she is outside of it. The universe is inside of her. (No, that's stupid, she knows. Too grandiose for what she is certain is just one sad fate for one sad girl.)  
  
But she had pulled the past closer to her with more and more ease as eternity played out, just like she had pulled back her own memories from the future. From forward or backward, she could tug at time, and it had only gotten easier with practice.  
  
So by the time Alex thinks, staring up at Ren's cell-phone as he takes their Origin Story Selfie, _I can just leave_ , it is really very simple. Objective. I can do this.  
  
It feels as if she's lived that night a hundred years in a row. It's probably longer. She doesn't know how long went by before the memories came within her reach.  
  
And the ghosts, they are tired. They are quiet. Like a church, if you will, not empty, but filled with a sleepy, Sunday-morning hush.  
  
She faces the night with a sense of finality, but there is nothing to make it any more notable than the others. It plays out like clockwork, keeping her grounded, keeping her sane. Or, as sane as she can hope to be.  
  
Off the boat. Truth or slap. Rocks, and Jonas, and triangles. This part is easy. The ghosts are quiet. They flicker in and out of making her night miserable, they toy with killing these what-if silhouettes of her friends and bringing them back again, but it's very uninspired, and she tells them as much. That's not really their fault. They're only allowed so much deviation from the script. But it's less shocking to be shown an alternate path when you can remember that you've already seen it, even taken it, countless times.  
  
The hard part is Michael. The hard part is—knowing what to bring with you and what to leave behind.  
  
It was her fault that he died. It was her fault, and she could fix it. She does not want Jonas to be her _brother_ , and he isn't going to remember all of this anyway, not the way she will, and _God,_ she could save Michael. For longer than it takes until the record scratch sends her straight back to the boat, straight back into mourning _both_ their lives.  
  
But Alex is all about preserving the time stream. (She's read _A Sound of Thunder,_ thank you very much.)  
  
So she tells herself at first that she isn't allowed. Michael wasn't the ghosts. He wasn't this night. And it's awful, but she has to move on. She has no right to change what wasn't the fault of the ghosts with their own gifts to her. It's already some sort of unfair that she is even going to escape this at all..  
  
Instead she tells herself: _fix this one thing_ , this one night, this temporal tear that sucks up innocents and takes away their time by giving them an eternity. But you can't have Michael, and you know it.  
  
The thing is, though, time isn't linear. And the thing is, justice doesn't exist. If time can do whatever the fuck it wants, and Alex, to an extent, can do what _she_ wants _with_ it, then why pretend there are boundaries? Why is there a dotted line between then and now and even the future? The more control she has, the less she sees those lines. It's unfair that she's going to escape? It was unfair that she was brought here!  
  
It's pragmatism, Alex wants to think, mind racing as she half-listens to her brother in the past, desperately trying to justify her selfishness. Saving Michael could be forgivable, given what she has been through. There has to be some sort of treasure after a journey. Can it be called selfishness to save someone else's life? Is that _really_ so bad? When reality is going to let her escape a loophole with another loophole, the whole system is too fucked for her to be judged for this by anyone.

As if anyone is watching besides the ghosts. As if there are any Gods. As if Gods would give a shit about Alex.  
  
God, but she hates when Jonas forgets. She hates waking up on the boat to his distantly worried stare, too shy to nudge his way as close to her as her more familiar friends and family do. She can hardly stand it, even when it is brief, brief before the reset strikes.  
  
“Do your best with Clarissa,” Alex tells Michael, this time. He looks at her for a long moment, waiting for more. Don't go. Don't go. _Don't go  
  
_ She feels like the words are screaming in her head but can't pass her lips. Stick to the script. Why? She's broken it here, before.  
  
She swallows the plea and bows her head. Leaves it at that. Run off with your girlfriend, if that's what you both want. Get out of this tiny place and crash and burn if you have to. Or, you know, drown.  
  
In the rift, the guilt feels as heavy as the water that settles in her lungs as she regards the ghosts, glowing through Clarissa's eyes.  
  
“You want Clarissa, right?” Alex asks, a choice she has made, with shame and guilt and horror only once. The ghosts are silent, because they know this, too. “I'll do you one better. You can have me.”  
  
_We already have you._

They sound resigned.  
  
“It's different and you know it.”  
  
They are silent again. They have been so, so, strangely quiet, like they can sense that this time is different. That this was the last time. The whole world creaks and moans like rusted metal and a million tons of water pressure. They have worn her down and worked her up in the same measure. She has done the same for them.  
  
“Come on. You've had your time, and I've shared it with you. I can't get you back what I wasn't there for, but I can share what I have left. I know you're scared, but I'll be with you. It's not so different from using her as your vessel, is it?”  
  
If someone had told Alex, a hundred repetitions ago, that she would be so chummy with these fucking asshole ghosts, she would have laughed in their face. Even now she thinks of them fondly. Like an after-school special. They may be selfish, childlike abominations, but they are _her_ selfish, childlike abominations.  
  
And they are at a loss for words.  
  
_Why couldn't—we—_ _home_ _?_

“Because you would die,” Alex says shakily, and it hurts her just as much. The water in her lungs is gone now, and they feel empty, devoid of even air. Her stomach aches, hollow like her chest, and the weight around her could crumple her up like an empty beer can. “If we sent you back out of the rift, back to your time, you would just die there.”  
  
Nearly a hundred voices, minds, and thoughts, and they have nothing to say.  
  
She thinks of Michael and the decisions she always thought she would make to her grave, but didn't. His death, her death, their death. What gives her the right to decide who lives and who dies?  
  
She asks them, soft as she can, because _do you want to just die_ , is a delicate question, “it's been a long time, now. You and me. Do you want to just go back to your own time?”  
  
The world screams. Their _no_ is a power-surge in her brain. It's familiar, only this time it doesn't come with having time torn from her hands to see past potentials and dead friends.  
  
Alex laughs, then laughs _harder,_ incredulous at herself for the first one. “Yeah. Yeah, I didn't think so. That's okay. You can come with me.”  
  
It's not a proper life. It's still hers, and only theirs to observe. And it – ends. Will end. This is terrifying and soothing all at once. How long has she been here that it is a comfort to face death someday?  
  
Alex has been possessed by them before. She always figured the whole blooming metaphor meant they'd over-grow her, like insidious vines, until the Alex at her core was covered up as good as gone. It's always been uncomfortable. Like being locked up in the void, seeing out your own eyes as an observer. Like having thick glass walls thrown up all around you. Sometimes you can speak, but they give you your options.  
  
Sit down in their seat and say their words.  
  
This time it feels strange. Sure. Of course it does.  
  
But it isn't so bad. They are complacent. A white-noise whispering that can distract her if she lets herself sink down to it, inside herself. Like walking into the ocean, easing deeper and deeper into the icy waves. She does it, of course, immediately. Tests her boundaries while she can, before it's too late.  
  
The noise gets louder as she lets it. They aren't even speaking to her, just _thinking_. A cacophony of words and ideas with no unity at all, not like she had expected, not like she is used to from the possession. It's overwhelming. The uncontrolled excitement, confusion, apprehension, newfound comfort – all amplifying each other in her head like an echo chamber, and then _God,_ one of them tries to _speak_ to her above it all, and Alex feels her legs go out.  
  
She can't make out what they say. Her head is pounding so much, she hardly feels her scratched up knees on the ground. The weight of the water really could destroy her, if she's still underwater at all. She's been in this rift countless times but this is what drowning must be like. Her vision goes spotty, eyesight impossible to focus on past the stabbing mess in her head.  
  
She hears herself groan in pain and tries to step back from all this. She tries to visualize it to help herself, tries to control her mentality instead of her body, when both sound like impossible tasks. She should have steeled herself, and she trusts them, or she wants to, but there is panic as a soul rises up more successfully than herself. God, is this what they wanted? Is this what they wanted to do to Clarissa, or in the long-run, the long-long-long-run, to _her_? All those repetitions and she's fooled like _this_?  
  
But the voices that overwhelm her so strongly that she cannot complete a coherent thought, are still mostly where they should be.  
  
“You're alright,” she hears herself say, but the inflection isn't hers. The voice that rose above her speaks softly through her lips. “Breathe. You can do it. This will get easier for all of us.”  
  
The deep breathes are not her own. Not at first. She comes back to herself, aching all-over, and exhales, shaky. The control returns to her hands like a gift held with care. Her legs are still jelly and she can only see through tunneled eyesight.  
  
They are a part of her now, inside her head, inside her thoughts and her heart, sharing all her hurt and guilt and sadness. There is a part of this that is horrible. Being water-logged with an extra ninety seven infinite souls is a living nightmare, and always will be. It is an instant invasion of her privacy and of her sense of self, and even past that there is a small part of her that hates it for very juvenile reasons. They know every secret embarrassment, every buried memory, bitten-back thought. The feeling is surreal, but it's a two way street, so hey. At least they're even.  
  
Alex breathes. She does not have to speak out loud anymore, but does anyway. “Thanks, Anna.”  
  
Time is not linear. It is something Alex can pull at with her fingers. She thinks of radio-waves controlled by a dial, but she doesn't need the radio for this. It isn't furniture, this time. It's herself, and forward for once.  
  
The only way to get past a record-scratch is to move right past the damaged track. Jump ahead. It's cheating, really. She's all tangled up in infinite loop, so the solution is to just—poof—right outside of it. There's no untangling this knotted up timeline, so she'll jump up ahead to where it's smoothed out. The path there doesn't matter if you aren't taking it. A contained infinity can be escaped if you know where the border of it rests and know how to move yourself beyond it.  
  
It's all very conceptual, but it makes sense in Alex's mind – and in her hands.  
  
She tugs. She listens without losing herself, and it's easier this time.  
  
_Ready?  
  
__Ready.  
  
__Alright_ _._

  
***  
  
Alex isn't sure where the loose end of this knot will take her, _exactly_. Or even what her world will be like, beyond it. Taking a year off, or in college? If she's in college, _where_? Because God knows she hadn't decided yet, and that internal debate had been dismissed way back.  
  
She doesn't expect to come to on the hard flooring of the boat, at any rate. Not somewhere within the loops range.  
  
Infinite iterations of a play-pretend version of this have left her a poor actress, but this time she is sincere, head throbbing, as she asks, “Michael?”  
  
A hush falls over her friends, their unintelligible murmuring going silent. The hand on her back, helping her to sit up, is not Michael's. The broad figure over her smells like tobacco. He sounds guilty and vaguely hurt, “Alex...”  
  
She knew better. She is still begging _don't go,_ nonsensically in her head, far too late.  
  
The world spins around her as Alex sits up, and she tries to place the blurs until her head finds its way between her knees, eyes clenched shut in surrender. She tries again. Ren, Nona, Clarissa, and lastly Jonas, with his fingers resting hesitant on her shoulders.  
  
She feels the others staring her down with worry. Jonas asks, for all of them, “are you – do you need anything? I mean, can I...?”  
  
“I feel sick.”  
  
“Oh. Uh.” She forces her eyes open, and watches the morning light on his Jonas' face as he looks around, searching for nothing in particular. When he fails to spot a miracle cure, he looks back down to her. “Are you gonna... Do you want help getting to the railing?”  
  
She swats at him, and her laugh comes out just as weak. “I'm not gonna puke.”  
  
He doesn't say anything, but lets out a small sigh of relief. She is relieved, too – that he still remembers. She isn't sure _what_ he remembers, exactly, but this is better than strangers.  
  
She should have spent her time with Michael more meaningfully than just another round of should-he, shouldn't-he about his high school girlfriend. She should have said _don't go._ It's the shadow of every other thought she has. She imagines asking him like she had the ghosts, _Michael, is this alright? Are you okay dying?_  
  
Of course fucking not, but he did, and it was her fault, and she could have changed it, and she fucking _didn't_.  
  
Jonas holds her clammy hand as they stand up together, and doesn't comment on her sweaty palms. She has to force herself to pull away from him, knowing she could get away with staying longer. She feels disgusting. Inside her body is a graveyard.  
  
The chatter starts almost instantly, everyone fussing about her, and then themselves, and then it tapers back off to trivial things like prom and photos and lost and found books.  
  
Alex doesn't throw up, true to her word, but she sweats so badly that her hair sticks to her forehead, and the nausea doesn't go away. Her eyesight goes in and out of feverish tunnels, and her limbs feel heavy and foreign.  
  
Things are different, but predictable. Tiny deviations. The way Jonas stays glued to her side is new, but so is the weak tremble of her knees that motivates him. Ren still praises Nona to the high heavens for finding his book. They still take a final photo. Clarissa still offers Alex a shy sort of smile as they pose.  
  
“Here, like, I'll just pick a random page,” Ren begins.  
  
Clarissa interrupts, “maybe another time, Reginald? Alex looks like she's going to faint here, any second.”  
  
“You've got her, right?” Nona asks Jonas, who only lets out a sort of indignant huffing sound in response. Alex isn't sure if he's offended that she had to ask or that it's been designated his responsibility, but his hand that had hovered at the small of her back presses down as if she is the one who needed the reassurance.  
  
The camera flashes. The conversation wanders, and so do they. Nona and Ren sit together with Clarissa. Jonas stays with her as she leans over the railing, trying to ground herself in the misty breeze.  
  
“I didn't realize how tired I was,” he mutters, rubbing at his eyes with his free hand. His palm on her back seems to have shifted to a loose hold around her hip. She isn't sure when that happened or why he thinks it's okay, but _God,_ she is tired too, and doesn't have the energy to pretend she doesn't like it. Or to care that it's inappropriate. This will bother her later.  
  
But for now, she leans into his shoulder, knowing it's a burden and knowing it sends a message. She can feel almost a hundred distant memories burning at the edge of her consciousness. First flirtations, eyes catching, knuckles brushing, knees knocking.  
  
“Ghosts are the new caffeine,” she says. Jonas purses his lips instead of laughing, so she does it for him, fake and uncomfortable. No. The ghosts are tired, too. A heavy murmur hanging low in her heart, like the even breaths of a hundred people sleeping inside her.  
  
She will have to explain this all to him, but the thought of it is so overwhelming that she forcefully dispels it. She will deal with that later.  
  
For the first time in quite literally forever, the world is uncertain.  
  
The life lottery. Sleeping by the seaside. Alex knows better now. Maggie Addler's life was long and guilty, and now Alex's will be, too.  
  
***  
  
It feels strange to go home together. She hasn't seen the reflection of this very many times. She always had Michael instead, giving her a steady grin as he fished his keys from his pocket. Jonas is the other side of the coin; he fidgets terribly, thumbing along the edge of his cell phone while Alex unlocks the door. He doesn't look out of place to Alex. He just looks like he thinks he is.  
  
It's nearly nine in the morning, and Alex has been up over twenty four hours. For an eternity, quite literally. A day at a time, forever and ever until today.  
  
She almost misses sleep as much as she is afraid of it. To accept things as they are, to allow this day to _end_ for the final time, is a tremendously difficult thing.  
  
The worst part is exchanging the “good nights,” with fake laughter. The worst part is watching Jonas go up the stairs. The worst part is the glimpse of Michael's room over his shoulder. The worst part is Jonas closing the door behind him after giving her another awkward 'I know you know that I don't belong here' smile over his shoulder. The worst part is the early morning sunlight that feels more like shadows than anything else.  
  
She had expected Michael. And he's dead, he's _dead_ , she knows that, he's _been_ dead. She has to settle in to this reality all over again.  
  
Maybe she could go back to save him, now. Time is still in her hands, eased into them so slowly that not a thing about it is unfamiliar. She doesn't know what she expected – maybe for this to slip between her fingers when she left the rift.  
  
The lesson is supposed to be: you have to accept death.  
  
Sure, Alex thinks. Tell that to the ninety seven extra souls that send ripples through her veins of shallow amusement and deep, bitten-back rage at her hypocrisy.  
  
So much could have been avoided by accepting death, and the ghosts know this, and she knows this, so the lesson was learned. You should accept death, inarguably.  
  
But pragmatism is key in the supernatural. That _should_ be the lesson, but not everything is going to adhere to it. After all, Alex is giving the ghosts some bonus time with the drawback of it being hers and not their own. She doesn't even know how to quantify her own trade-off. Eternity for an escape from it. Time for time. Her body inside hell or hell inside her body.  
  
The lesson is: you didn't _have_ to accept anything, and that means the lesson is: you have to feel guilty when you _do_. You have to miss him all over again, like his funeral is still on the horizon and you're still having break-downs on your bedroom floor, because to an extent that is embarrassing to admit, he was your motivation for _everything_. You have to feel just like you did the first fifty times you pulled out your cell phone to text him during lunch break. Like the first hundred times you caught yourself talking about him in present tense.  
  
You have to feel the parts of you that are intrinsically tied to him, which is all of you, dissipate and fade away. Jonas is no replacement brother. You can't replace someone. You let their place inside you dissolve with acidity. You let pieces of yourself die with them.  
  
The overwhelming presence of the ghosts does not make her chest feel any less hollow as she curls in on herself beside her bed. She hunches forward, curled tight, gripping her unmade bedding with white-knuckles. Silent sobs shake her whole body, sickening and painful, but she forces herself quiet. If she lets out a sound she might scream, and Jonas would hear her from up in his room.  
  
Alex wishes she were upstairs with him, with a distraction from her grief. She doesn't want to be apart from him, either. She gives herself a pass for being clingy, today. Traumatic experiences do that.  
  
Someone has an idea. She doesn't know who. Quiet in the back of her mind, one voice speaks up when all the others are silent for her mourning. Then it spreads, growing into something pushy, shared, agreed upon. It's just like a game. They can _show_ her. There is no such thing as right and wrong, the world simply _is_ , there is no justice, there are no rules, they can—she can—pull and tug and play with her time.  
  
It's an apology, a surrogate; make up for what you can't have by taking everything else you can.  
  
“—Well, good night,” Jonas says again, with a forced chuckle.  
  
This time, standing at the foot of the steps up to the attic, Alex can't return it. There is a thick lump in her throat and her eyes sting from tears she hasn't started to shed yet.  
  
The world plays out in front of her in paths. Like multiple choice answers on a test. A. Say goodnight, part ways, go to your room. Seen it.  
  
Option B. is to stay up.  
  
“I'm just gonna,” Alex says, stumbling over her own words for a moment and pausing to swallow. “I think I'm gonna stay up. So I don't mess up my sleep schedule. I'll go to bed early tonight.”  
  
“Oh, _God_ ,” Jonas groans. “We're going to need coffee.”  
  
Then there's option C.  
  
Alex almost wishes she weren't conscious of it.  
  
You aren't supposed to ask your new step brother who just met you last evening to lay down with you.  
  
He isn't supposed to accept. You aren't supposed to curl up against his shoulder and breathe in the smell of tobacco and forest from the clothes he doesn't even change out of. You aren't supposed to lay awake for another three hours, staring up at the posters over your bed and whispering together about your childhoods as if you need to learn everything about each others' past in a single night. You aren't supposed to watch dusty light in his messy hair when he dozes off first and you aren't supposed to want to kiss him.  
  
And so she doesn't. Option B.  
  
“Coffee!” Alex blurts out, an adamant decision. Jonas startles, but the owlish way he blinks at her could just be exhaustion. “Good idea!”  
  
The caffeine only makes her brain worse. The voices are a sickening mix of confusion and guilt and indignance. They wanted to help, look, she made a different choice, they _helped,_ why is she upset? They aren't forcing her to do anything, they are just reminding her, _reminding her_ , that she can do this herself. This is her, now.  
  
Something vaguely monstrous.  
  
Alex sits on the couch next to Jonas and tries to soothe herself and her passengers in equal measure. Whether it is the television or his drowsiness that keeps Jonas distracted to near silence, she is grateful. It keeps him from noticing the way her mind wanders, constantly jumping tracks from her own to theirs and back.  
  
She isn't sure how long they make it. Just that she sees the time at around two in the afternoon while channel flipping, and does not even recall what show they settle on watching.  
  
When she is woken up, lights are flicking on around her, cutting through the sunset darkness of the room. She hears her mother say fondly, “oh, look at you two. Wake her up, will you?” Then, quieter, footsteps padding off in the direction of the kitchen, “Left cupboard, Honey. I told you they'd get along just fine. Parties are like speed-bonding for kids their age.”  
  
Jonas shifts beside her, and she rolls her head off from his shoulder. She hears him snickering at the drool on his sleeve, feels him slide away from her to stand and stretch. She tries not to watch the roll of his broad shoulders, and aggressively doesn't care about how she looks with mussed hair and rumpled clothes.  
  
They have Chinese take-out for dinner. It is strange and pleasant to watch Jonas and his dad talk, a comfortable sort of interaction that she hasn't had the chance to see much of from him. She wonders if he finds her and her mother just as interesting.  
  
It is strange to see another man sitting in her father's seat. But this is not a wound re-opened. This isn't someone taken from her too early, this is someone who _left_. It is worse to see Jonas where Michael used to sit. Dad for step dad. Brother for step brother.  
  
She doesn't get the chance to work herself miserable with that train of thought. Jonas catches her eye and steals a piece of orange chicken from her plate. She is startled into laughter, and steals beef from him to retaliate.  
  
Her mother's laughter is as good as a guilt trip.  
  
***  
  
She tries not to fuck with time, really she does. It's just that sometimes the ghosts are _right_. There is no justice, so what's wrong with playing the hand you're dealt? What's wrong with choosing to be the dealer?  
  
Okay, so every one of her metaphors falls apart quick, but the point is that Alex does her best to be a good egg, but also does her best not to guilt herself when she's a bad, bad, selfish, time-traveling egg.  
  
There aren't that many reasons to want to, thankfully. Life is – good. Amazingly, simplistically, ordinarily, _good_. So what if she's a walking horror-story? Having a chorus behind your every decision becomes the new normal with more ease than one would expect, and the latest decision is what to do about college. It's one more year off, but that time will go fast, she knows.  
  
The novelty of such a normal concern is still shiny and fun, even before the hundred different perspectives on where to go and why. (This is the strange side of possession. They are oddly invested in the mundane.)  
  
Ren comes over to play sometimes, though less frequently than he used to, now that he has a girlfriend to dote on. Thank God, Alex thinks, because maybe this will finally get their schoolmates to stop acting like the two of _them_ are dating. And Jonas makes for good company in the absence.

They're inseparable. It isn't surprising.  
  
Two months go by. Summer vacation always passes in a flash. Being free is easy to take, like this. At home, a day at a time, doing as she pleases. Soon she will have her senior year of high school, have to be around more people than the ones she is hosting inside her. She'll have to write essays and listen to teachers and have lunch breaks. God, that sounds like so much. She remembers always being bored of Summer vacation by the end, excited to go back to feeling productive and to being on a schedule, but now it just feels like too much, too soon.  
  
She has been loitering in Jonas' room all day to sulk.  
  
For the fourth time, Jonas asks, “are you sure you're alright?” He turns down the radio. He didn't need to. His voice carries, the low rumble of it easily distinguishable from everything else that blurs together so nicely. The quieted music, the traffic in the distance, and the wind catching in the leaves outside.  
  
Alex would roll her eyes, if they were open. “I'm _still_ fine, dude.”  
  
He lets out a skeptical, “uh-huh.” The knob of his radio clicks, and the volume rises again. He always listens to oldies. The kind of music her dad liked, through static that she's almost amazed he can stand. Static tends to set her on edge, these days.  
  
Behind her eyelids is glowing, sunlight coming in bright through the attic window. The bed smells like dust. Like cigarette smoke. Jonas is too respectful to smoke in the room that used to be Michael's, but the scent is in his skin and in his hair when he rests his head on these pillows. Honestly, she almost wishes he would switch to smoking weed. The smell doesn't sink in as deeply. It doesn't kill him slowly, the way a cigarette does.  
  
She should tell him soon. That the night was infinitely longer for her. That she is never alone anymore. That time is flexible.  
  
Alex searches for words, taking in suggestions, though the way they come in is more concept that verbal, and most are terrible. She settles on silence.  
  
There is a rustling sound above the music, Michael's—Jonas'—his chair scooting backwards. A heavy sound. The bed bounces underneath her as Jonas' weight settles at her side.  
  
The bright behind her closed eyes goes out, and Alex scrunches up her face. Above her, Jonas snickers.  
  
She only opens her eyes because she is startled to feel his hand come to cup her cheek. He is closer than she expected, leaning over her. His expression falters, awkward and shy, as if he hadn't expected her to question this, but he does not pull away.  
  
“Hey, Jonas,” she says eventually. His palm is warm, almost unpleasant in the heat of the room, but she feels herself lean into him anyway.  
  
His voice is low. It always is. “Hey, Alex.”  
  
He's getting closer. His fingers slide down until they brush her neck. He closes his eyes, and a dozen voices are telling her to arch up to meet him, and she wants to, she _wants_ to.  
  
—No.  
  
“Are you sure you're alright?” Jonas asks her, and Alex kind of wants to excuse herself to have a panic attack in the other room. But hey, what is she good for if not pretending everything is fine?  
  
What are the other options? She should have told him. She needs to tell him. How can he even _try_ that when he doesn't know the extent of it all? They have only known each other for a couple of months at best, as far as he knows. She's only allowed to – feel like she does – because it was so much longer for her, and she knows she _isn't_ allowed, not really, so what excuse does _he_ have?  
  
She isn't holding it together as well as usual. The voices try to prompt her, helpful, but it's too late.  
  
“Alex?” The worry in Jonas' voice is suddenly more real, and his chair drags across the floor. This time Alex's eyes fly open.  
  
He sits down beside her again, and though he leans forward, does not lean over her.  
  
“I'm fine,” she lies, the lilt of her own voice uncomfortable. “We're fine. You hungry? I'm gonna go – make a sandwich or something.”  
  
***  
  
She tries to forget. The ghosts won't let her. Every moment of every day they want her to do something about this, and she has to tell herself again and again that he is her _brother_. She spends far too much time beating herself up over this, because how _dare_ she trade one for another, and how _dare_ she try to choose some stupid boy she likes over Michael?  
  
It's all a mess, because maybe she could have had a normal life and a normal crush on a normal boy. If Michael were alive. But he isn't, and she thinks, _I tried, I tried,_ and wills the guilt to leave her body.  
  
Refocus.  
  
Ren is in the middle of the aisle, fussing over spiral notebook colors while Jonas shifts in place and rubs at his elbow. The approaching start of school has been making Jonas anxious for the past three weeks, and if Alex had to guess based on what he has and has not been saying, he is not particularly accustomed to needing school supplies. Maybe it's just that he's been a out of school for so long that coming back is scary.  
  
Alex gets that.  
  
Everything is scary, now that it's real.  
  
Ren squints at the various price stickers on the shelves. “Color is important. You wanna be excited to be taking notes, so you should get a notebook that's a color you like. So when you're pulling it out you're like _yeah, party-time._ ” Jonas shoots Alex a look, and she can only shrug in response. Ren continued, undeterred by their silence, “I like purple. It reminds me of Nona.”  
  
“Nona's more of a navy blue,” Jonas mumbles.  
  
“What?! No, Alex is blue. But like, teal.”  
  
Ren is perceptive in his own way, trying to make Jonas feel more comfortable through talking bullshit. Alex wonders if noticing this means that she is perceptive, too. She snorts. “I'm red.”  
  
Ren sounds positively scandalized. “Clarissa is red!”  
  
“Clarissa is white.”  
  
Ren hits air-drums, “ba-dum-tss,” then, as if to appease Jonas' arched eyebrow, adds, “don't worry, I know I've got her beat.”  
  
Alex watches Jonas' shoulders relax in his laughter, a slow ocean-wave roll as the conversation tumbles along. Alex feels sorry for anyone else who wants to make use of this aisle, because they absolutely don't have what they need yet, but all progress has halted in light off the disagreement.  
  
“You're purple,” Jonas says to Ren with a tilt of his head, looking so sincerely contemplative that now Alex laughs. The sound is jarringly loud as it echoes across linoleum tiles, and she mashes her palm over her mouth to stifle it, still snickering.  
  
They both look at her, and she tries to save face. “Ren is yellow.”  
  
Ren begins, “Nona is—nnnnevermind that's bad,” then buries his hand in his face and mutters, “she made that joke the other day to Clarissa's face, I saw it, she said it, they laughed, I'm not awful, I promise.”  
  
“You're awful,” Alex and Jonas deadpan. She sees him look at her from the corner of her eye and has to force herself not to look back.  
  
Ren presses on. “So – synesthesia conclusions. That's the word, isn't it? Clarissa. Red.”  
  
Jonas is far away for a moment. His eyes are dark and his voice quieter, “yeah. Red sounds right..”  
  
Alex wonders if he is thinking of blood on the ground or ghost-red eyes. Alex wonders how many illusions of her death he even remembers. She wonders if everyone who only lived that night once, just _once,_ those lucky assholes, were shown those branching realities or if they are something that only came with the repetition. Time is so flexible, forwards and back, that it's impossible to say without the memory.  
  
“I still think white,” she says.  
  
“Nona,” Ren says, like he's going down the list. He snatches up a spiral notebook from the shelves and holds it up in example, grinning. “Purple.”  
  
“Indigo,” Jonas grudgingly concedes.  
  
“Orange,” Alex says. At the raised eyebrows she crosses her arms defensively. “What? It's her favorite color! Ren, you're her boyfriend, you should _know_ that!”  
  
“Just because it's her favorite doesn't mean it'll remind me of her! Me next, me next!”  
  
“Purple,” Jonas says.  
  
“Yellow,” Alex says.  
  
“Green,” Ren says, met with simultaneous groans.  
  
“ _Jonas_ is green!” Alex says.  
  
Jonas is quiet for a just a beat too long. Just long enough that Alex remembers that he could have tried to kiss her, and that making sure he didn't get the chance doesn't change that he wanted to. This kind of casual closeness is scary, and she hates having to analyze everything she does when it all comes so naturally. She feels a flush traveling up the back of her neck and doesn't want to look at him.  
  
Maybe she's just an idiot for over-thinking this. His voice sounds normal when he offers, “green is nice?”  
  
“Jonas is blue,” Ren says.  
  
Alex asks, “I thought I was blue?”  
  
“You thought you were red,” Jonas points out.  
  
“It's the red jacket,” she says. “It's iconic.”  
  
Jonas is suddenly very interested in grabbing green notebooks off the shelf for himself, and just says, distantly, “ah.”  
  
There are too many little things that she is over-thinking. She hates this. The ghosts are quiet. So is Ren, watching them with a sort of calculating expression. He does not say anything  
  
This gives Alex a strange sort of anchor. A sense of safety among all the upheaval. She picks out blue notebooks, and everything will be fine. She still has her best friend by her side, and he will help her ease back into reality like he helps everyone – without even knowing he is doing it.  
  
School will help. A schedule, but each day still different from the last. This will be good for her.  
  
“This is impossible,” Ren laments, finally, and they give up their color discourse for the day.  
  
***  
  
School is only good at _first_.

After all of her Summer vacations being filled with play-dates with Ren, and this Summer being fresh-filled with Jonas – it's unusually lonely to sit through class without them. By the unlucky hand of the Gods, they share no classes, and so she only gets to see them during lunch break, when everyone pours into the too-small lunch room together.

Maybe lonely isn't the right word. Alex wonders if you can call it loneliness when you aren't alone. She misses _specific_ people during _specific_ times. She misses Ren, knowing they'll see each other during lunch and after school. She misses Jonas knowing that they're going back to the same goddamn house after school. And she misses Michael, even when she wears his old clothes and tells herself she is getting better.  
  
The ghosts do not care about her grades and they do not care about her test scores. They do, however, get just as childishly bored as she does during lectures, and with this they become less well-behaved. There are times that they know answers, which is a conveniently uncatchable way to cheat, she'll admit – but more often than not they are just layers and layers of chatter and distraction, pushing her attention away from her studies and towards her impending headaches. Like today.  
  
It has been a particularly bad day. The ghosts are all on edge because one of her teachers mentioned the USS Kanaloa, and apparently they expected her to stand up and make corrections. Their hurt and rage and indignance hones in on every little thing, every tiny inconvenience. The crowded halls, the sound of lockers, gum at the bottom of her shoe, and the ever-increasing crowd at Ren's lunch table.  
  
Alex tries not to be consumed by the irritation, but she refuses to dull her own emotions for them either, because they are _not_ in control of her. They are guests, and she is the host. She reminds herself that Ren's friends are always nice to her, that they never treat her like a third wheel, that she has never hated them.  
  
The steadily growing group isn't all Ren's friends and band-mates anymore. There are girls now, a small crowd that Alex only recognizes because Camena is tiny. Today it is Hannah in the inside seat of their booth, and Brooke sitting on a counter nearby. Alex remembers taking gym with them last year.

Of course Jonas is popular. And that should be a good thing, right? It can be hard for the new kid to make friends. He's friendly, and he's... Objectively handsome, Alex would have to say, if forced. He has that balance of sweet guy and bad boy that girls probably go for. Or whatever.

He isn't as cool as they think, though. She can see how flustered he is by the way Hannah is leaning too-far into his personal space, and there is some sort of plea in the way he looks from the her to Alex and then back.

Alex maybe sets her lunch-tray down on the table too hard.

“You okay?” Ren asks, watching Alex slide onto the bench where there is not really enough room. Her hips knock into Jonas' sharply and she lets her elbows jab him aside. He doesn't complain, just makes as much room for her as he can.  
  
Alex pretends not to notice the uncertainty of the two girls now that she is here. Maybe they don't want to flirt with him in front of his sister. Maybe they can tell something is wrong between them. Maybe they're thinking _don't kill this one too,_ _Alex_.  
  
No, that's just the bad mood talking. Alex lies, “fine.”  
  
Jonas' foot nudges hers, a silent call-out. She does not look at him.  
  
Ren is less tactful and blurts out, “uhh, bull.”  
  
She waves him off. It is not necessarily a lie to say, “I have a headache, so I'm grumpy. Let it be, so I don't bite your head off over something dumb.”  
  
This time he believes her. Both he and Jonas fall back into their conversations from before she arrived. Ren and his friends talking bands and out-of-town shows, and Jonas is trying to politely uphold his end of a forced conversation about his old school.  
  
“It's too far,” Ren's friend, Connor, complains.  
  
Ren laughs. “Yeah, but no one is going to come out to a tiny place like Camena. Seattle, maybe Portland. But if Florence can't get jack, why would Camena?”  
  
One of the other girls, Brooke, is grinning, She asks, “so you were in juvie?”  
  
Alex feels Jonas' shoulder against hers tense, then relax again as he sighs. She wonders how that sort of rumor even got out. She wants to snap, _Jonas isn't like that,_ but doesn't butt in. It isn't her business.  
  
“Yeah,” Jonas says. He does not elaborate.  
  
“Our town is basically the same as a prison,” Ren interjects, interrupting his own conversation just to come to Jonas' rescue.

Jonas drawls, “maybe that's why I feel right at home.”  
  
Hannah doesn't get the hint. She leans close, touching his shoulder and asking, “what did you do?”  
  
Alex wants to say _he beat the shit out of someone, much like I am going to do to you if you don't back off,_ but she bites it back. God, the ghosts are getting to her today. She should not be in such a rage over something so petty. But she is, and they only ever encourage her sour moods.  
  
Jonas breathes in and opens his mouth to answer, because of course he does.  
  
It's all branches. Alex can see the trajectories, but none of the ways this plays out seem right. Maybe because it's _still_ none of her business. What right does she have to fuck with his friendships like this? With girls flirting with him? Whether she's helping or hindering, she should just stay out and she knows it.  
  
So she exhales, and eats her lunch, and listens to Jonas say things he doesn't want to say.  
  
Her whole body feels hot. It's anger, and only some of it her own. The fire of it is unfamiliar. Even the silence doesn't seem like what she wants, but she tells herself there is not always a perfect solution.  
  
Hannah's shoulder is flush against Jonas', but he shrugs away like it's nothing to him. He practically interrupts her thoughtless curiosities, reaching out to touch Alex's arm and asking, “are you sure you're alright?”  
  
“Fine,” she lies, for what must be the millionth time since the island. It comes out harsher than she had meant, but she already warned them she was in a foul mood. She pushes her tray towards the middle of the table. “I'm not hungry.”  
  
“Alex,” Jonas says, with that same sort of look on his face as when he first spotted her in the cafeteria today. She had thought it was a plea for rescue, but she's beginning to think it's a plea for understanding. Like an _apology,_ as if having girls hanging off of him is something your sister should need to forgive you for.  
  
Like he thinks that's what she's mad at. It's infuriating that he's right. That's fucked up. She's fucked up. She's fucked up, and angry, and when she stands up, Hannah leans farther onto Jonas, scooting over before he makes more room for her.  
  
It's such a tiny thing, but she feels the hairline fracture like something cracked between her fingers.

She wonders if this is what Jonas felt like when he snapped.

The cafeteria is silent and empty.  
  
Hannah is collapsed on the floor, bleeding from her nose. Her half-lidded eyes glow red, but she isn't breathing.  
  
Realities flicker like the quick shutter of a camera, because she can do what they do now, she can see the possibilities, even ones she would never make real. Hannah with her hand clasped tight around the knife in her own neck, Hannah with deep red finger bruises around her neck. Hannah and broken glass, shattered windows, splintered desks.

When it settles, everyone is gone except for Ren and Jonas and Alex – and the dark figures looming in the reflections of windows. They are her shadows, stretched far, embedding themselves into the fragments of this vision. Maybe all their schoolmates are vanished into a void or maybe the three of them are the ones in a rift that Alex tore open herself. That feels right. It's her first time doing this herself, and she wants to blame the ghosts, but it was her. It was her.

She mutters, helplessly, “stop.”

With the silence broken, Ren lets out wordless, vaguely hysterical sounds for a moment. When he musters up language again he blurts out, in one breath, “Alex what did you do, did you do this, how is this happening _again_ , I'm _so_ done with this, is she--?”  
  
“It's not real,” Alex tries to assure him, eyes clenched shut. That might not be true, but it hardly matters. It's like wrangling in a dozen children having a melt-down at once. She can feel them getting closer, shadows closing in from all the windows into the air, trying to spread into Hannah's body to have one of their own. Or to punish her in some misguided protectiveness of Alex, she doesn't know, but she won't let them.

 _You can't just_ do _this,_ Alex tells them, with as much authority as she can muster. Which should be more, given that it's _her_ body that hosts them and carried them back with it. She thinks of water behind a dam, and blaming the water for the flood instead of the wall that broke too easily.  
  
Will Ren even remember this when she gets a hold of things? Will Jonas? She doesn't want them to think of her like this, like something unstable and terrifying. Even if she is.  
  
And will _Hannah_ remember?  
  
_Yes, yes, no,_ the few obedient voices answer. She still cannot tell them all apart. But they giggle still, like this is all a joke. It lacks a certain horror by now, knowing it isn't real, but that's made up for in knowing that this is _her_ now. Ren looks like he might have an aneurysm and Jonas is just silently staring at the shadowed figures. They get closer and closer in floating steps, but always look blurred by distance. Alex almost wants to roll her eyes at them and call them over-dramatic.  
  
That thought does not make it a body on the ground any less frightening.

She feels like she is her mother, having hushed arguments with her father over the phone in the midst of their divorce, as if being one-room away and shout-whispering would keep Alex from hearing. In the depths of her mind she is pulling and soothing the shadows in equal measure until one by one, they disappear from outside of her and come back.  
  
Ren is talking to her, but she tunes him out, focusing on retrieving her passengers. She doesn't know what he is saying but tells him, “it's fine, Ren, just give me a minute.”  
  
She tries not to hear Jonas' words cutting through it all, “it's you this time, isn't it?”

“Just – shut up for a second and I'll get it together,” Alex hears herself saying, almost babbling as her mind races along on a completely different track, “I'm sorry, okay, I know I should have this under control and I will, I'm really, really sorry,”  
  
Ren only manages, “Alex, what,” but Jonas says, “it's okay,” though it sounds forced.  
  
She can feel the last ghost behind her, and she can feel when it dissipates.

She wants to cry. If the voices inside her are right, and they are going to remember this, then she will finally have to talk about what she does not want to. She does not want to admit that she decided to make her own life a nightmare and more than that she doesn't want to admit that she doesn't completely have it under control. And, ridiculously, stupidly, she does not want to admit what her breaking point was.

She hates how broken her own voice sounds. “Please don't remember this.”  
  
Closing the rift is like cleaning up a spill. It's a child's mistake, like a misstep in reality to mop up. And their memories – those are a stain that she wasn't strong enough to stop.  
  
Sound bursts back into the room in an instant, dozens of conversations from students around them. T he sun is bright through the window, even through the thic k coastal fog. Brooke asks, “ s o you were in juvie,” one last time. Alex hopes.  
  
“Move,” Jonas says, to Alex, as if he hadn't heard the girl at all.  
  
It is with heavy resignation that she scoots off the bench to let Jonas up. Hannah's hand follows his shoulder, but Jonas does not seem to react in the slightest to her presence, not even with relief. Instead he just grabs Alex's wrist and pulls her through the crowd, towards whatever empty hall he can find .  
  
She hears Ren announce, “I'm gonna check on them,” and the shuffling sound of him climbing over the back of the chair instead of asking his friends to move.

Jonas doesn't wait for him. He doesn't appear to have a destination in mind, just somewhere quiet. Thankfully most people have congregated in the cafeteria, and the breezeway near the science building is empty. And cold.  
  
Alex shivers and tugs Michael's jacket tighter around her, dreading this conversation. It still hasn't started by the time Ren catches up, though she thinks this is probably because Jonas is simply at a complete loss for words.  
  
“ They weren't—” Ren tries, then falters. “They weren't closed into that rift? Didn't you do the thing? In the cave, with the radio? What the heck is going on?”  
  
“I think this justifies saying what the _hell_ , Ren,” Jonas mutters. Alex is annoyed that this is the first thing he says about it.  
  
“I think,” Ren snaps at him, “it justifies saying whatever I want to say, but _thank you_ for the input!”

“Stop,” Alex mutters. “I'm so tired of having to pull the reigns on _children_.” She doesn't want to talk about this. The brick wall is rough even through her jacket as she leans back against it. “I closed the rift with myself in it,” she says, because that seems concise enough.  
  
“Not following,” Ren says.

She doesn't even know if they remember the night the same way she does. She has thought about this so much that it's dizzying, but it is all pointless in the face of actually having to have the conversation.

“Well,” Alex says, “there were only so many options, you know? I could sacrifice Clarissa to them, which–”

“–W _hat_?”  
  
She brushes past it without pause, but makes note that apparently Ren's version of the night came without that bit of info. “Which wasn't going to happen, obviously. And to close the rift you had to be _in_ it. So I was just in there. With them.”

She glances to Jonas, but he is quiet, and Ren is the one to ask, “in _where_?”

Alex isn't sure how to answer, and so she doesn't. “Anyway, I. I'm not sure. I could do more and more the longer I was there. And eventually I could leave. And I... Brought some extras with me. Like... Souvenirs.” She tries to force a grin, but knows it doesn't work.  
  
“You're possessed,” Jonas rephrases.

“Yeah, but it's fine.”  
  
Ren runs a hand through his hair anxiously. “It's clearly _not_ fine, since they just almost _killed_ Whats-her-name! And I'm not even sure why they didn't or how they didn't or how they _did_.”

“Hannah,” Alex offers. “And I've got it under control. It'll get easier.” Then, a quieter admission, “It's not just them, it's _me_.”  
  
“You've been like this... Since that night?” Jonas asks. She still feels dissatisfied with his reactions, but doesn't know what she had hoped for instead. She can only nod, slowly.  
  
Ren starts to say, “but today, what even started–” but cuts himself off and looks away, apparently thinking better of the question.

They stand in silence, uncomfortable, for far too long. When the bell rings, Alex suddenly has to remember that there are more people in the world than the three of them. Ren tells her, “I'll see you after school, okay? Let's walk home together.” But he turns his back quickly, and Jonas follows him after one hesitant glance back to her.  
  
She wants to slide down the wall and sit and not move for a year. At least the rage is gone, but her head hurts and she is sweating and still wants to cry .  
  
The ghosts feel no remorse.

Alex pushes off the wall and leaves school early.

_***_

She tells her mom she's sick, and shuts herself in her room. Jonas doesn't bother her, and his dad swings by to bring her dinner on a tray at almost eleven at night. He's sweet, and she knows that he doesn't believe she is sick for even a second. But there was thought behind waiting until so late to get her door open, and there is thought behind the way he doesn't pry.

Ren texts her a stilted get well soon message when she misses school the next day. She asks for an update if she misses anything. He doesn't reply.

Alex waits until noon before she dares to leave her room, just to be sure that Jonas has gone to school and that their parents are out at work. Being at home in the silence of a weekday is surreal, but pleasant. All the stress of trying to keep her shit together for the massive audience of school and her own family are gone.

This relief lasts maybe thirty seconds before she gets to the kitchen and catches Jonas slouching by the counter with a bowl of cereal in his palm.

“Do they not have tables where you're from?” She asks, taking vindictive pleasure in watching his shoulders jump.

He looks at her like he's going to retort, but then just shrugs and says, sincerely, “table was usually covered in junk back home.”  
  
“Ah,” she says.  
  
They are quiet for an awkwardly long time before Alex finally goes about looking for her breakfast. She settles on poptarts, and ignores the clearly judgmental look in Jonas' eye. They need to talk and she knows it. She stands beside him, leaning back into the counter.  
  
“So,” Jonas says, when he has finished his cereal. He sets down his bowl. “You're still _super_ possessed.”  
  
“Yeah. I'm still super possessed.”  
  
“When did you plan on telling us?”  
  
“Eventually.”  
  
“I'm... Gonna need some time on this.” Jonas says, and his voice cracks with the honesty of it. Alex doesn't blame him, or at least, she doesn't want to. She would never want to share the burden of this, really she would not. But it's hard to hear. How can _he_ need time for this? How can _anyone_ but her? Ren still has not texted her back, and he is usually a texting machine, even in class.  
  
This reminds her. “Yeah, that's fine and all but – did you skip school?”  
  
“Really don't think that should be the priority.”  
  
“You were out of school a long time, can you afford to be missing?”  
  
“Alex.”  
  
“Are you going to graduate on time, even? With the time you spent out of school? I guess you're in the right year – right?”  
  
“Alex.”  
  
“Is your dad going to be mad? I feel like he knows I'm playing hooky but lets it slide because it's not his business – but he'll be worried about you.”  
  
“ _Alex_.”  
  
She finally quiets. The voices are an incomprehensible white-noise, like they are mumbling amongst themselves about him. She can tune out the crowd inside her, but imagines them over her shoulder, watching. It is surreal. She has a poptart in her hand and ghosts in her mind, standing barefoot on cold kitchen tiles.  
  
Alex sighs. “What, Jonas? Do you want to tell me I made a bad choice? That I deserve my freedom but they don't?”  
  
He looks ready to throw his arms in the air. “Yes! You deserve freedom more than the ones that kept you captive to begin with! And none of us deserve for that _shit_ to follow us off the island.”  
  
“Yeah, you guys are the real victims, here,” Alex says, rolling her eyes. She knows she did the right thing. Out of her options, the right thing.  
  
“That's not what I mean.”  
  
She feels like a grumpy child for rejecting what is meant to be his apology. She grumbles, “yeah, yeah,” and shoves the last bit of poptart in her mouth. She does not want to look at him, and instead aggressively stares at the side of the fridge. She is getting so, _so_ tired of avoiding his eyes.  
  
She can feel Jonas watching her. She wants to see his expression, but still does not look.  
  
“What was it like? You said you were shut in there.”  
  
Alex swallows. Wipes crumbs from her fingertips on her pajama pants. “It was just the same night. Over and over.”  
  
When she spares a brief glance in his direction, he is avoiding her gaze just as intensely. “How many times?”  
  
“I don't know. I didn't remember the resets at first. Then it was just bits and pieces or, like... Deja vu. Eventually I could remember, and then... I stopped counting.”

“Then what's the last number you remember?”  
  
“I don't know! I _really_ didn't count!”  
  
“Okay, okay. I just – I want to understand. For us it was one fucked up disaster of a night and now it's been a couple months, and then you're like, _surprise,_ you had to be there longer and it's not over.”

“It's over,” Alex lies. “I was there for half the eternity that they were, but it's over now. And I know it's fucking weird, but this is just life, now.”  
  
“But you don't have it under control,” Jonas observes, too matter of fact for her to argue. Yesterday is too obvious for her to deny it.  
  
“I'm working on it.”  
  
Jonas' sigh mimics hers. After a moment he mutters, “God, I don't--” then trails off. She finally dares to look at him without immediately looking away, watching him run his fingers through his hair. She realizes, for the first time, that he has not brushed his hair this morning. It's a mess, even more so, now.  
  
When she snickers, he looks her in the eyes, then catches on to what she is laughing at. Instead of fixing his hair, he reaches out to hold her hand.  
  
“Hey,” he says, soft. “I got you, though.”  
  
His thumb strokes over the back of her hand.  
  
Time jerks backwards like a startled hiccup. She catches the end of her own laughter – it's an odd feeling to be at the tail-end of an action you weren't taking anymore. Jonas looks her in the eyes and his arm only has time to twitch before Alex is pushing off from the counter top.  
  
She blurts out, “so! Free day! Whatcha wanna do?”

***  
  
Ren does not text back all day, but he is at her door at way-too-early-o-clock the next morning, ready to walk to school together. He is outside her classroom at the end of the day with a soda for her, fresh from the vending machine.  
  
On the walk home, he balances on the edge of the sidewalk, making frequent grabs for Jonas' shoulder to steady himself. It is some semblance of casual that comforts them all. Alex has never much worried about him when he does things like this, but a brand-new addition to herself can see all the ways he could stumble and hurt himself. Sprained ankle or worse. She tries not to look at them.

Ren says, “so you've got them all. Right in there. In you.”  
  
“Nearly a hundred extras.”

“Do they... Like... _Bother_ you?”  
  
Her passengers are quiet, like waiting for her judgment with baited breath. Stupid, when they already know it. When they wouldn't change their behavior no matter what she thought of them. It is getting easier and easier not to be overwhelmed by them.  
  
“Yes and no. It's... Complicated.”  
  
“No shit,” Jonas murmurs.  
  
“It's like...” Alex begins, but has to think for a moment. “Like having a bunch of people hovering over your shoulder. And they don't know how to have an internal monologue, so they're just narrating everything you do and how they feel about it, literally all the time, forever.”  
  
“Torture,” Ren jokes, but she gets the impression that he only does so because he cannot comprehend the scale of what she is saying. There is a tinge of nerves in his voice.  
  
“I can tune them out, sort of. It's weird. But I feel what they feel and I feel what I feel, and it can spiral out of control. But... I am in control. I am.”  
  
Ren ventures, “the other day...?”  
  
“That was the worst it's ever been,” Alex says, slowly. It feels like treading on thin ice. She can't let the veneer of control crack, not to her friends. Worse – and she feels ridiculous that this is worse to her – she cannot admit what really happened. That all it took was a bad day and a girl flirting with Jonas.  
  
“She was so annoying,” Ren says, at least half-aware of the source. “I guess it's not surprising that she was annoying to _everyone_ present.”  
  
Jonas offers, “her friend was cool. Brooke? But, uh... Hannah's a bit much.”  
  
“They've been all over you since school started and you still barely know their names,” Ren says, laughing.  
  
Jonas waves a hand in the air. “I hate people.”  
  
Ren and Alex chime in together: “Same.”  
  
But Alex doesn't feel the swell of genuine hatred that she expects from the ghosts. Not even anger or resentment. Just the sleepy sounds of whispered conversations. This makes it easier to relax, even when Ren stumbles and his life flashes before her eyes: sprained, twisted ankles, skinned knees, blood on the pavement, scraped up palms.  
  
Ren catches himself on Jonas' shoulder.

She's got this. This is good. They have each other.  
  
***  
  
Alex knows what siblings are like. Sure, she and Michael were close as could be, but the fact was that they did their own things in their own rooms. They had their own friends, even if there was overlap. They had _alone time,_ just like they sometimes hated each other. Not often, but sometimes, and always over petty, silly things.

Alex knows that it is not normal the way she and Jonas spend their time together. The way they brush their teeth side by side in the mornings, the way they walk to school together, eat lunch together, walk home together, then sit and spread their homework across the table to work on it together. They watch tv together. Alex lays on the bed while Jonas sits at his desk, and they read, and play on their phones, talking sometimes, other times sitting in silence.  
  
They are always together, and that is not how things should be. That is for middle school besties and high school sweethearts.  
  
It isn't normal that every little thing they do, every piece of their schedule, is carefully planned around the both of them. Any movie they want to see in the theater is scheduled around them both, every outing with Ren. It isn't that they don't get their own time, don't do their own things. They just do those things side-by-side whenever possible. They just offer company, invite each other along first – always.  
  
It feels dangerous, because Alex knows it is right on the cusp of being unacceptable. It's always a comfort to have Ren around, because it means they are not alone. And because he is Ren, and Alex loves him, bad jokes and all.

Ren has an appointment with his therapist, today. He can never be honest with his therapist about what happened that night on the island, and now he knows that it isn't over, will never _really_ be over. Alex thinks this is kind of funny, but also very sad. Ren has trouble talking to her about it, still. She understands, but it still hurts. Nothing is broken, not like it sometimes had on the island, but it's a bit cracked. It is brittle, still.  
  
Jonas is texting as he trails behind Alex. The sun is setting early, all purples and crimson and bright glowing orange, edging up around the clouds. Their pace has been slow. He hasn't walked this walk a thousand times yet, not like Alex, and so having his eyes on his phone slows him down.  
  
“Nona seems like she's doing okay,” he says. “She says Clarissa, not so much, but. They're managing.”  
  
Alex doesn't turn around, staring into too-bright sunlight over the treetops and slate-tiled roofs. “It's easier to take it in when you don't have to deal with it.” Jonas lets out a breath like he wants to scold her, but she hurriedly adds, “I don't mean that like a snipe at all of you or anything. I really just mean that she's farther away. Like... It's easier. It's a good thing.”  
  
She can hear the digital clicks of the keys on his touch screen. The quiet sound of a sent message.  
  
She hears crows, and is so, so aware of the dark shadows all around them. Sometimes she feels power thrumming through her, tingling at her fingertips. Sometimes she feels like a ghost, ready to haunt someone, ready to show them everything fucked up about this world that they don't see.  
  
She isn't as spiteful as the ghosts. Even their spite is dulling. Like an argument that goes too long until it's a joke, until both sides mean every word they say, but can't stop laughing, even at themselves. She has to be a conduit for their emotions, but the reverse is true, too. They leech from how ridiculous she knows they are being.  
  
Crows in the trees and a water-color sunset.  
  
Jonas asks, “have you ever liked someone that you really shouldn't?”  
  
Alex's fingertips twitch. Shadows flicker with them. “What do you mean?”  
  
“Like someone you can't date,” Jonas answers, quickly. She turns to look over her shoulder. His ears are red-tipped as he adds, “like... Someone who... has a boyfriend?”  
  
Alex blinks. Something pops into her mind. That night had mostly been the same, once she could remember it. There were deviations to see if they helped, there was more and more furniture, more and more of the past and the future drawn in.  
  
But she had always stuck with Jonas. Except – she remembers when she hadn't. When she and Ren had come back with the radios, and Nona had still hooked herself a dinner date.  
  
Or maybe Jonas had been the one to hook it.  
  
Roads not taken, right? Who's to say that the things she prevented ever _were_? Ever could have been?  
  
She laughs, grateful it doesn't come out as bitter as she feels. She is stupid. She is stupid to think anything she has been thinking, stupid to think this was a constant, and stupid to even care this much. She thinks, _but the kiss_ , and then thinks _who fucking cares, who fucking knows?_ Those things didn't _happen,_ and it's not like you can only be interested in one person at a time _._  
  
“Thankfully, no,” Alex says. The shadows are curling around her heart, making it ache. “Call me lucky.”  
  
The blush has spread to his cheeks now. She doesn't really know how to give him a pep-talk on Ren and Nora breaking up. She wouldn't want to break them up. Ren is important to her too, and he's head over heels.  
  
“Yeah,” Jonas murmurs. “It's stupid. Never mind.”  
  
Sometimes she thinks of throwing reason to the wind and doing whatever she wants. Saying whatever she wants. She can go back, after all. A big cosmic 'undo' button that only works now that she knows how inconsequential it is, that only works now that she's already moved past the only things that she'd sell her soul to undo.

But she sold her soul without doing them, and that guilt still hasn't gone away.  
  
It is, thankfully, much easier to talk through heart-break when your life is already an existential nightmare. She still feels like she's lying when she says, “hey, buck up. Maybe you'll win her over. Or maybe you'll find someone new.”  
  
“Do you think it works like that?” He asks. “Sorry, this is stupid. But, to like... Just get over someone?” There is a very long pause before he adds, like an after-thought, as if the situation itself still confuses him, “or, like, for them to leave their... Boyfriend?”  
  
“It's probably better to count on yourself moving on over the other person coming around, but both are possible. I mean, look at our parents.” Jonas winces, but Alex continues, “they found each other after... You know?”  
  
You can't have it both ways, Alex tells herself. You can't shut down every move he makes and expect him not to give up.  
  
But Jonas' expression is falling, like she is saying the entirely wrong thing. He is just short of giving her that look he gives her when she's being a dumb-ass; when she's playing pretend with Ren and taking their jokes seven degrees past the limits of his patience.  
  
“What if you're just around this person all the time. And you get along great. And they're great. And, like, God, I know this sounds cheesy and stupid, but – like, the idea of overcoming obstacles just seems so, like, it's nothing. It'd be nothing compared to... That person.”  
  
Gears turn in Alex's head. Nona really does not spend as much time with them. Clarissa and her still live in a different social circle – the island didn't change that. Even when they invite Nona out, she often cancels for piano practice, or “piano practice.”  
  
Jonas spends more time with _Ren_ than with Nona. Almost as much time as he spends with Alex, really.  
  
Alex lets out a startled, “oh,” and bites the inside of her cheek, as if to retroactively shut herself up. Ren. Ren? “Jonas...”  
  
“Sorry,” he blurts out, coming to a stop. Alex does the same, finally turning around to face him proper. “It's lame to... I'm not trying to harass you with this. Forget it. I don't want to be pushy. Is this messed up of me? To talk to you about it? Is it way more fucked up than I'm treating it?”  
  
“There's nothing wrong with liking boys,” Alex ventures, as gently as she can.  
  
“What.” Jonas says. It is not really a question.  
  
“Um... What what?” Alex returns, feeling more unsure by the second.  
  
He looks at her for a long time, scanning her face like he has to figure out each inch of it. Like he's looking for a hint that she's joking.  
  
The silence stretches, uncomfortable and awkward. Jonas sounds annoyed, but she can also hear the bitten back laughter behind it. “You thought that I was talking about Ren.” After an embarrassed pause, she nods. Jonas repeats, more severely, “ _Ren._ ”  
  
“So, Nona?” Alex tests, but knows like she has all along that it's not the answer either.  
  
“Oh my God,” Jonas exclaims, throws his hands up, and then returns to aggressively texting in silence.

At home, they sprawl across the couch and watch game shows, Jonas slouching terribly and Alex with her feet pushed up into his side. She takes guilty pleasure in digging her toes into his side until he nudges her to stop, then doing it again moments later.

Jonas is an idiot for trying to skirt around things so ambiguously. She is an idiot for... The way she is, really. All of it. She wants to bury her face in her hands and wants to go back, but it's far. She knows she could. The ghosts want to, just for fun, just like stretching to wake up. She urges them back to sleep. She lets out a quiet sound of annoyance without meaning to.  
  
“Figure something out?” Jonas asks, nodding to the screen.  
  
Alex gives the screen a once over and considers the category and letters. But shakes her head. “I got nothin' on this one, man.”  
  
Then he finally asks, “what about earlier? Were you just _playing_ dumb? Or actually being dense?” He sounds amused. Like he would take either answer just as happily. But most of all, like he already knows.

“Little of both,” Alex says. Her face feels hot. Her hands are clammy. She shifts her feet against his side and watches the perfect model white girl on television strut her sparkle-clad ass over to the screens. She watches letters pop up on the screen, and squints at the completed answer for not occurring to her earlier.  
  
Jonas lets out a similarly disappointed sound. Then says, a bit flatly, “ah.”  
  
He waits for more from her. This is too direct to play off like nothing, and he is looking at her, shy and expectant all at once. It is a complicated set of feelings, complicated in that he already knows her answer and is just waiting for her to admit to it.  
  
She rewinds. She thinks she could do this as many times as it takes. She thinks she might have to.

“Figure something out?” Jonas asks, nodding to the screen.  
  
“It's _house_ ,” Alex says, wearily. Jonas makes an annoyed sound, the same exact one. Alex lies, “I have reading homework. I've got to shut myself in my room for the night.”  
  
It isn't getting any easier to run from this.  
  
***  
  
No one thinks to ask her what she can really do for months. _Months_.  
  
School goes well, but not amazing. College is approaching, and Alex has no fucking idea what to do with her life, so she follows Michael's plans instead. She applies to the college in New York that he was shooting for and gets accepted, which feels vaguely miraculous, because she is nowhere near as amazing as he was. She also gets accepted to a university in California – the one she applied to with Ren.  
  
History major. Alex can't remember if it has always been her favorite subject or if that started after Michael – or after the island. She was already only half herself and half desperate copies of things Michael liked. Now there are ninety seven more contenders vying for her brain-space.  
  
Therapy is still helping Ren, like it always has. It's _impressively_ helpful for the limitations he has with honesty, so as to avoid being committed. Trying to explain the island or the ghosts could only be a one-way ticket to a psych ward.  
  
Sometimes Alex is jealous. Sometimes she wishes she had said 'okay,' when her brother died and her parents' marriage fell apart, and her mother had offered to set her up an appointment to talk to someone. But she had said no, that she was okay, and let herself slide back in the background of everyone's grief, let herself slip away and mourn alone in the quiet.

She figures it's too late. What good could a therapist do to help her cope with a death she could undo if she really wanted? What good could they do about the trauma of longer-than-their-life in a time loop? About literal poltergeist possession, a shipwreck of souls resting right with hers, etcetera, etcetera.  
  
The hellscape of Alex's every day life would be a little out of their scope.  
  
She wonders what they would think about her little crush on her own step brother. They'd call it projecting, she guesses. Over-compensating for loss.

It isn't little. And, she wonders, what would their excuse be for _him_?  
  
He tried to kiss her, he indirectly _talked_ to her about it, and she knows nothing has changed. He is always trying to make moves. She would think he was a bit pushy if it weren't for the fact that according to his timeline, he never went through with a single one of those ideas.  
  
Sometimes she worries that Ren will catch on, just by the way he looks at her. She worries that he already has. Alex - she has had infinite time to fall and fall hard, but Jonas? One night. A couple months, now. That's it. And they're in high school – they are children, _babies_. That might be the ghosts talking or it might be her own time. She wishes she knew if she were eternal or just seventeen.  
  
And she wishes that Jonas might someday just wake up and not look at her like he knows he's found his soul mate.  
  
She isn't sure how she would take that kind of a loss, but figures, hey, a girl doesn't _need_ romance. Why pine after a guy when he's still a part of your life? He is family, after all. And she can't say she would be lonely. She has the extra company of ninety seven more people. _Forever._  
  
But not really forever, not anymore. Just until she dies, and that is much, much less time. (To die without Jonas sounds like the cruelest part of all of this, Alex thinks. Then she thinks _you are being so melodramatic, calm down.)  
  
_ “I'm gonna get water,” Alex announces. She is seated on the couch, watching Ren and Jonas lose Mario Kart to the CPU. The boys sit on the floor, leaned up against the couch. Alex's toes are curled over Ren's shoulders, her heels pushing at his back idly. “Anyone need anything?”  
  
Ren can't take his eyes from the screen, intent on coming in seventh place and nothing less. “Water with ice,” he says, his tone that funny kind of flat it gets when he is too distracted to emote properly.  
  
“I'm good,” Jonas chimes.  
  
They both groan when she walks in front of the screen. She rolls her eyes, but the ghosts groan back mockingly in static; the screen jumps and flickers into white-noise.  
  
Alex lets out a thoughtless, “oops,” and reels it back in. The game fades in. “My bad.”  
  
Ren squirms in discomfort. Jonas is far more used to this. She's scrambled the television in front of him before. Not often, but it has happened. She's done it to his phone, too, and the stereo in his car.  
  
When Alex comes back, she sets Ren's water down on the end table for him. She sits back down, planting her feet between his shoulder-blades. It's a small comfort that he leans back against her instead of shying away or complaining. They're okay.  
  
Even if he does ask, “so... You can just do that now, huh?”  
  
“Guess so,” Alex says. “I can mess with most tech. Not like the tech itself, but... Signal interference, I guess.”  
  
“But that's not even, like, satellite or cable. That's just HDMI, from console to screen. You can mess with _that?_ Is it just electricity that you're fucking with?”  
  
“Guess so?” She is, sincerely, not sure how it works.  
  
“What exactly _can_ you do now? And how much of it is... You?”  
  
Alex hums to show that she is listening and will answer, but gives herself time to consider as she takes a long drink of water. In the meantime Jonas offers anecdotes on what she's done around him. When their bickering over the bathroom or who needs to do which chores gets so high-strung that his phone shuts itself off. When she had a nightmare last month and her alarm went off at two in the morning to wake her from it. When that asshole cut them off the other day and Alex had been so startled that the radio switched stations.  
  
“That sort of stuff,” Alex agrees. “I can also, um... Like what you saw in the cafeteria. With Hannah.”  
  
Ren shudders, but says, “I'm still not clear on what that is.”  
  
“It's... Weird. I guess it's like... A pocket?” This does not seem to satisfy anyone, based on their willingness to look away from the game to give her equally dry looks. “Like – you know. A pocket... Dimension. Or, like if time and reality is a horizontal line, it's like turning down, then doubling back in a square. And then you get back on track. And the pocket is like... That square. The empty part inside of the outline you made.”  
  
Ren and Jonas exchange looks. Jonas says, “that makes literally no sense, but go on.”  
  
She huffs. “Well. Okay, so – the pockets. I can make those. And I can... See things, sometimes.”  
  
“Like dead people?”  
  
“Like potentials. The pocket is like isolating a moment, or people, and fucking with the possibilities with that. Like you've got the actors and the tools. Like playing Clue. But with the potentials it's not actually stopping or creating anything. It's just... Knowing the outcomes of different things.”  
  
“Oh good,” Ren says. “You're a psychic now.”  
  
“No, just... Sometimes you just have choices to make, right? If I'm mad I can tell you, or I can keep it to myself. But I can see what will happen either way. Or sometimes I can just see things that _could_ happen, even if they aren't going to.” She closes her eyes. “That's how it is a lot of times. They like to show me worst case scenarios.”  
  
“ _Super possessed_ ,” Ren reiterates.  
  
Jonas interjects, “wait, wait, wait, so you can like... Predict conversations? Or... Things people might do?”  
  
Alex doesn't think before answering. “Yeah, sometimes. I can also jump back a little bit and change my choices. It's hard, though. The rest comes easy. Going back is tiring.”  
  
Ren _yells_ , something incoherent, then very quickly blurts out, “time travel! Oh, no big deal, just – you can predict the future and also reverse time! That's not important! Why would you even tell that to your best friends? You just, just – pull the _you never asked_ card, aaa _aaaaah oh my God, Alex_.”  
  
She considers going back. Instead she looks to Jonas, hoping he will offer some solidarity in the face of Ren's behavior.  
  
But his eyebrows are furrowed and the broad line of his back is tense. He is staring at her like he's figuring out a puzzle.  
  
“You've been going back,” he mumbles, so quiet that Alex nearly misses it behind Ren's continuous groan. Their eyes meet, and though she quickly looks away, it's too late. He laughs, and it sounds borderline hysteric. “Every time I thought about saying – something – you would change the subject before I could–that's...”  
  
Her gaze darts from him to Ren and back, but Jonas doesn't seem to need the reminder. He quiets himself, but there is no understanding behind it, no compassion for their position. His shoulders square. She can see him leaning away from her.  
  
Hurt and betrayal are feelings that are too easy for her to empathize with, even when they're caused by her.  
  
“I believe you without proof, by the way,” Ren throws out, “I think we're past that. but. Just... Like... How much have you backpedaled on us? How much have you seen and heard from us that hasn't happened for anyone else? That's messed up.”  
  
Alex rushes out “I haven't been! It isn't like that!”  
  
“How is it not like that?” Jonas sounds tired, and she knows he is having a different conversation with her than Ren is.  
  
Her voice comes out weak, barely above a whisper. “If I were just doing whatever I wanted all the time I would have already undone this conversation. It sucks. But I'm not... I'm not trying to manipulate you. I only...”  
  
The television is muted, and the screen is covered in the fuzzy black and white pixels. Alex isn't sure when that happened. The room is quiet and uncomfortable.  
  
Ren murmurs, “I know, Alex. You just should have told me.”  
  
“Every time we talk about what I am now, we fight. I don't really like bringing it up.”  
  
“It's better to have honest conversations with your friends, even if they're uncomfortable,” Ren says, as if he is quoting someone. Then, “it's just a lot. It's a lot, and–”  
  
“–Wait,” Jonas interrupts, as if his voice has forgotten that his body is clearly in a sour mood. “Did you just say _what_ you are now?”  
  
The television screen shuts itself off.  
  
“I want to stop,” Alex says, because she does not know what else to say. “I don't – I don't want to talk about this anymore.”  
  
Ren can't keep his tone as sympathetic as he tries to. He is too frightened and frustrated. “Okay. We can drop it for now. But this isn't a one-and-done conversation. You're not alone, Alex.”  
  
“I know,” she says. She wants to say _of course not. I'm never alone anymore, even when I want to be._ Instead she turns their game back on.  
  
It takes time for the tension to ease away. Jonas doesn't push it. They only get through half a race before deciding none of them can play properly, and settle on watching tv until Ren leaves for the night.  
  
Alex and Jonas part ways, somewhat early in the night for them. Before they do, Jonas lingers at the foot of the stairs. The first step creeks under his weight.  
  
Their parents are in the other room, and Jonas mumbles, “you should have just shot me down.”  
  
She hisses his name, not sure if she is scolding him for thinking it's that easy or for talking about it like this.  
  
“Instead you just let me – creep on you like an idiot – God, how many times?” His voice gets louder, then quiets again when he catches himself.  
  
“You didn't,” she whispers, vehemently.  
  
Jonas mutters, “I got it, okay? Don't worry about it.”

She shifts her weight. She told Ren she would not undo today, and so there is no avoiding this. Her heart is pounding, and as it does the dead inside her swell to match her mood. They amplify it. Her heart aches, it aches so badly for the love they've lost. They cling to hers like they are trying to regain the sensation, like starving men given scraps, tearing it apart and tearing _her_ apart to spread it out among themselves.  
  
She wants to run and she can't – they want her to kiss him, and she can't do that either. They want her love, they want to be loved, and they miss their families, their lovers, their friends, their lives. They want to live like she is, they want teenage drama and they want the comfortable, grown-up way that their parents are chatting in the dining room nearby. They _want,_ they _want,_ and Alex is the funnel for it all.  
  
She rubs her chest over her heart, wincing. It helps to focus on the sensation of her shirt's fabric under her fingers, itching with a hundred times her own desire to do something. It is a vague comfort that it is one of Michael's old shirts, a ratty old thing with holes in the sleeves and tour-dates on the back.  
  
Jonas is clueless to the hurricane time-bomb inside her, to the nuclear reactor she calls her heart these days. He sighs, and his shoulders sag as he tells her, “really, don't worry about it. It's not as big a deal as it seems like. So... Now I know.”  
  
The light over the stairs goes out for just a split second before Alex catches herself again. Jonas is making a face she can't read.  
  
This is good. This is good. It's settled and done, the problem is gone, and surely it's only a matter of time before her passengers stop violently pushing at her soul from inside of it, desperate not to lose love again. Idiots – don't they know he won't be the last? That's how it _works_ when you're young. She can hear them, disjointed words and phrases in mismatch voices – not because they are broadcasting through radio-clips but because none of them can hold the coherency to speak anymore. Not in words.  
  
_Cold, cold, cold,  
__Mistakes,  
Gi_ _ve and take,_

Alex watches Jonas head up stairs.  
  
In the night she dreams of Michael and his “just in case” package. There are no words, but she watches his lips move and tells him that of course she'll make him proud. She'll say yes, like he wanted; she'll study hard in New York.  
  
She asks him _do you hate me for this?  
  
_ She wakes up to silence, somehow piercing even after a wordless dream. She glances at the clock by her bedside and has to briefly re-learn how to tell time. It is four in the morning on a Sunday, and she can hear Jonas' alarm clock blaring music for just a split second before she stops it and the quiet dark takes over again.  
  
***

Alex and Jonas still brush their teeth side by side in the morning. They still bump into each other, groggy from sleep, and still laugh as they bicker their way out the door for school each day. The same way they did before, even though Alex knows that it is different. There is a pit in her stomach and it all feels like an act.  
  
She feels hollow. _Melodramatic_ , she scolds herself, but it doesn't change that days and days follow where she feels like she is floating through time. Nothing but a vessel for the oohs and aahs of the dead.  
When she asks Ren if she can hang out, he immediately asks about Jonas' schedule. It takes a beat of silence for him realize she means alone, but he doesn't question it. He does, however, look increasingly alarmed by _Jonas_ not questioning it when they part ways after school. Jonas just mumbles a, “cool, see you later,” to them both, and hardly waits for a response.  
  
This is probably the most honest Jonas that Alex has seen all week.  
  
At Ren's house they watch garbage tv to the ambient sounds of his little sister Ellie in the living room. It feels nostalgic to hang out, just the two of them. It has happened, since the island, but it has been rare. Not just because of Jonas' sudden inclusion in all aspects of Alex's life, but because of Nona's inclusion in Ren's.  
  
They're going strong. It's the one good thing that came from the island, Alex thinks. The ghosts resent this. She resents them back.  
  
“How long are you going to hold onto all this?” Ren asks her, abruptly.  
  
Alex has to crane her neck to look away from the crappy old tv on his dresser. Ren is sunk into a beanbag chair that has been patched up too many times, and he sets her with an impressively serious expression for a boy being devoured by purple pleather.  
  
“What do you mean?”  
  
“Look, Alex. It's not like it's weird to have a couple things. But you're leaving soon, and I'm still... Not sure you're alright.”

He doesn't mean the ghosts.  
  
“Not following,” Alex lies, mostly to buy time while she thinks of an exit from this conversation. Her fingers find the hem of her shirt – one of Michael's old shirts – and toy with it anxiously. She hasn't bought new clothes in a long time. Not a single one of his things ever left their house. What isn't in a box in her closet is hanging up in it.

“I just... I've been ignoring it a long time, and I'm not sure if I should, or not. And don't get me wrong, if it was just the jacket I wouldn't say anything. Really. Or if it was just wearing his shirts sometimes, that's not weird. Or _just_ going to school where he was going to. Or–”  
  
“–Okay, I get it,” Alex interrupts. Her knuckles are pale. Her shirt is wrinkled at the bottom, and she forces herself to let go, but can't stop looking at the twisted fabric folds. The list could go on, she knows. The first time she dyed her hair she had said it wasn't worth the hassle – until Michael wouldn't shut up about it. The music she listens to is half his. The only books she's read in a year are from his shelf.  
  
“But it's _all_ of that, _all_ the time.” Ren's voice is sympathetic. It's delicate. He's always had the perfect tones for talking to people. Alex can't tell if it's his therapist's influence or his family's. They have always been so open.  
  
Not like her family. They had always been the type to keep their problems to themselves. It had only escalated after losing Michael – when it would have been most important to do the opposite.  
  
Alex is quiet so long that Ren continues, “I know you have a lot going on. And I know it's hard on, like, all of us, obviously, but mostly for you. I just don't like the idea of you running away from your problems.”  
  
She isn't sure how to take that. Every time she tries to articulate a response, everything turns into mush in her head halfway through. All she comes up with is, “I'll still be the same in New York, Ren. I'm not running from anything, I'm taking it all with me.”  
  
Ren's expression says that this isn't a comfort.  
  
The path away from this conversation is getting farther and farther. It takes a deep breath before she can commit herself to not avoiding it, to facing him with honesty. She runs her thumb over the edge of Ren's blanket – the quilt his grandmother made him that matches his sisters'. The ghosts listen with baited breath, and she can only imagine them as shadows outside the windows again, staring in shamelessly with palms against the glass.  
  
“Everyone is leaving, Ren. It's okay. You're going to California, Nona is going to the UK, Clarissa is probably going out to the east coast, too.”  
  
She wants to ask _what makes me so worthy of worry,_ but she knows the answer. They are swallowing her whole.  
  
If it's an argument they are having, Ren doesn't have a proper retort. Instead he asks, “what about Jonas?”  
  
Alex stills. Carefully, she asks, “what about him?”  
  
“What's he doing after graduation?”  
  
“I don't know. I don't think he knows. It's – hard. He'll probably stay here to be close to his dad.”  
  
“You gonna be okay?”  
  
Alex laughs with the absurdity of the question. “Yeah, I think I'll live.”  
  
“I don't judge, you know,” Ren says, seemingly out of nowhere. She is afraid to ask what he means, but because he is Ren, and is terrible, he actually elaborates. “Whatever's going on between you two. I know a lot of people might not get it, but–”  
  
“–He's my brother,” Alex reminds him, and hates the anxious waver of her voice.  
  
“He's not, though. Not really. And I know I'm getting on your case about leaving, but. I just think it would be good if he went with you.”  
  
“Yeah, well,” Alex says, “it doesn't work that way.”

***  
  
In the sunlight, the weeks drag on, day-by-day. In the night, the weeks have flown by without remorse. Alex would think this is a side effect of having a loose control of time and a hundred extra thoughts-per-second, but everyone around her expresses the same sentiment.  
  
Graduation goes smoothly. Jonas barely skates by with just enough credits and a whole lot of Cs. His dad forces him to go to the ceremony proper, but thankfully Alex's mother lets her skip out on participating. Instead she sits in the bleachers between her own mother and Ren's, and watches the ceremony commence.  
  
She is equal parts nervous and excited to leave this small town. Not all of her classmates that cross the stage think of her as a murderer, she is sure, but she us glad to be rid of them. The ghosts are bitter, but assure her that she is not a murderer, not _her._ They would know, after all.  
  
She wants to be unknown, and small towns like this are impossible for that.  
  
Her pride in Jonas is an overwhelming feeling, a warm that blooms in her chest as he sits with his classmates and shifts about through student-speeches that are just as awkward and stilted as Michael's was. Jonas twists in his seat to wave, blushing, but she knows it is to his dad and not her.  
  
She cheers obnoxiously loud, for Jonas. And for Ren, for Nona, and for Clarissa. She expects Jonas to fluster. Instead he just beams like sunlight. She expects Ren to take it with a grin. He joins in his own praise, shouting just as loud. She expects exactly what she gets from Nona: blushing, burying her face in her hands, and Alex is sure that she whispers _please stop,_ as Ren screams even louder.  
  
She isn't _sure_ what she expects from Clarissa. A glare, maybe even a middle finger.  
  
Clarissa blows her a kiss, and laughs, before turning to her classmates beside her and resuming their whispers.  
  
The ghosts _love_ this. They explode in her mind like laughter, like pride, like she is their daughter. Alex wishes this would please Clarissa, but she is sure mentioning it would be a mistake.  
  
After the ceremony, Clarissa finds her, and stands in front of her with crossed arms. Alex frowns – they had been on good terms, she had thought. Maybe Clarissa just knows how to play nice on stage. Nona is facing the terror of Ren's no-shame family excitement, and Jonas is lost in the crowd, probably with their parents.  
  
“Sat this one out, huh?” Clarissa asks, voice sharp.  
  
Alex just waves a hand, vaguely. “I don't like this sort of formal stuff.”  
  
Alex wonders if Clarissa remembers Michael's funeral. Alex had spent nearly the entire thing seated in the church hallway, back against the wall and knees pulled up to her chest. She had closed her eyes and listened to the muffled whispers coming from inside the room. She had cried in a bathroom stall, quiet and hunched over, curling in on herself. It was easier than dealing with everyone's grief, with being expected to show hers off like it would alleviate any of the pain.  
  
She hadn't wanted to face them. Conservative grown ups, double her parents age and judging her as a poor replacement for Michael. What good is a successor when she's got dyed hair like some punk? At least Michael, those assholes had always said, was a credit to their type. Alex had always wanted to remind them that he wasn't any less brown than she is. That he was the one to talk her into dyeing her hair to begin with. That he wasn't so picture-perfect as they thought, or he was, but not in the _ways_ they thought.  
  
But avoiding them meant avoiding everyone. She doesn't know what the funeral was like for Clarissa.  
  
“You know, I was thinking,” Clarissa says, looking distracted by her own perfect white nail polish that only makes Alex think of white-out. “Maybe we could pick out some classes together? Just, like, if you want to. Or whatever.”  
  
Alex takes a moment to process, but when she does she surges forward. “Yeah! I'd – I'd love to! Let's do it!”  
  
When Clarissa exhales, she looks like it is her first time taking a breath in hours. The relief is palpable as she stammers, “really? Oh, God, good.”  
  
Alex grins. “Wanna hang out with me _so_ bad, huh?”  
  
“Don't get me wrong,” Clarissa says, and Alex could almost be convinced they hate each other. “I just feel bad for you. Little Alex, out in the world, alone.”  
  
This gives Alex pause. “But I'm not alone,” she says, carefully. “You know that. And you're – you want to hang out? Out in New York? You're okay with that?”  
  
Clarissa rubs at her arm. Alex sometimes wonders how she ever thought of Clarissa as an ordinary old heartless bitch. She is delicate. Vulnerable, and willing to be, even in front of Alex. Maybe it's just because it's Alex. Alex likes to think they would have fixed things up even without the island, someday, but it is hard to imagine a world untainted by that shadow.  
  
“I'm not... Okay with it. But I'm okay with you. And... It'll be lonely out there.”  
  
The two of them are surrounded by the entire graduating class of their year, by all their families and friends, chattering and shouting. There are tickle-fights and balloons and photographs all around them. Alex can hear Nona, talking awkwardly with Ellie. She can hear Ren yelling in delight as Jonas lifts him up to retrieve a balloon stuck in a stage pillar.  
  
“You know,” Clarissa adds, her eyes following Alex's. “Without the boys around.”  
  
“There'll be other boys,” Alex says, as if this is was ever truly conceivable to her.  
  
“Oh, I know,” Clarissa says, amused. “I'm looking forward to that part.”  
  
Alex is startled into laughter, so hard that her gut hurts. It wasn't that funny, she knows. Maybe even inappropriate, given. Clarissa gives her an awkward sort of grin, like she thinks Alex is only forcing herself, or like she was worried about saying it and appreciates the reassurance.  
  
Over Summer break, Clarissa comes over to pick their classes. After nearly the whole day has been spent arguing over class-lists and mobile registration sites, they finally settle on Native American Art, a compromise between Alex wanting Native American History and Clarissa wanting Native American Literature.  
  
***  
  
Alex's mother takes her to the airport at four in the morning for her flight out. Jonas' father had said he would come, but he is fast asleep when they head out and no one has the heart to wake him after his long day at work.  
  
Jonas comes. With bags under his eyes and yesterday's clothes on, he stands with them, an awkward trio in front of the security check. Her mother is running down the list of _so proud of you, text me when you touch down, call me every week, no, not really every week, I know_ _sweetie_ _._  
  
The ghosts don't want to leave home, and very suddenly, Alex doesn't want to either. All the excitement of a fresh start, of people who don't know she killed her brother, of school and a future beyond this _one_ year – it all drains away when she looks at Jonas at the tail end of a yawn. He looks stupid and half-asleep.  
  
Her mom hugs her good-bye and cries. Alex hadn't expected her to. It isn't like she's dying. She'll be back over the holidays. She still feels herself tearing up, too. She scrubs her eyes with her sleeve when her mom pulls back.  
  
Jonas looks like he does not know if he should hug her, too. This is ridiculous, she thinks.  
  
They are always touchy-feely. They play-fight, they nudge each other, they poke and prod and kick and link arms. They fist-bump, they noogie, they sprawl across each other on the couch. Less so, over this summer vacation than the last, but even so.  
  
She had missed it more than she thought, she realizes, only when she wraps her arms around his waist. When her hands slip between his jacket and his shirt on accident. She can feel his shoulder-blades shift as he returns the embrace. She can feel his breath on her neck and shoulder as he leans into her, can feel the warm of his body radiating between them.

She likes the firmness of his chest against hers, likes that when she breathes in deep she is taking in the smell of her home, and his smokes and the particular body-wash he uses. His arms feel strong around her.  
  
She holds him tight, knowing she needs to let go.  
  
_Love,_ the ghosts relish, _love, love, love_.  
  
She draws back. She says good-bye. She goes through the security check. Waves one last time, over metal-bar fences and past the sleepy staff.  
  
Next is the long wait for her flight to actually board. She sits, feeling alone for the first time in over a year, and watches the sunrise.  
  
The airport feels like another dimension for how little the world exists beyond it. It is nearly empty and airplanes are as nonsensical as stars to her.  
  
***  
  
College is good. She actually gets to study subjects she enjoys, at least more than in high school. The dorms are small and plain, but nice. Her roommate is a girl named Maya, a bit terse, but not overtly mean. After Clarissa, Alex can handle it. She keeps to herself and spends much of her time out and about – which is perfect, because Alex spends most of her time inside. At first.  
  
It takes time to venture into the big world around her. She makes friends in her classes. She struggles with her homework. She writes essays at two in the morning the day they're due, slamming starbucks canned coffees in the library. Clarissa finds this hilarious, and always finishes her work exactly on time, apparently with extra time alloted for 'thinking of rude things to say to Alex.'  
  
They don't see each other much outside of class and the occasional study session. Their schedules differ wildly. Clarissa goes to parties and underground concerts. Alex goes to parks and arcades.  
  
She does go to small parties, sometimes. In cheap apartments full of ikea furniture and fairy-lights. Where the music is loud, but the speakers are bad, and the hosts have anxiety but still offer to mix her drinks of juice and soju in red solo-cups. (Natalie doesn't strike her as a party girl, but always seems to be the one.)  
  
Sometimes boys flirt with her. Sometimes she sort of flirts back. Mostly she just tells them the truth – that she isn't interested in dating right now.  
  
A boy she has seen in the library before is being particularly persistent, tonight. She had thought he was kind of cute with the rainbow paper-lanterns putting a pretty halo in his brown hair. She had even been alright with it when he put his hand on her knee. She had pretended the lanterns hadn't flickered with her nerves. They had dimmed like mood lighting when he leaned in to kiss her, and his breath smelled like cheap beer, but that was alright because Alex sort of _likes_ cheap beer.  
  
But she hadn't really wanted to kiss this boy named Eddie, for no reason in particular, and he had been pushy when she leaned away. He had leaned in again and his hand had slid up her thigh, unpleasantly firm, and the ghosts had sort of laughed at her, just a bit. They always know exactly how safe she is, exactly how much control she has to save herself. The twist of time feels hazy, right now, blurry at the edges from alcohol.  
  
It was probably the flicker of the lights that had Clarissa glancing in her direction, but Alex locks eyes with her and must look some kind of helpless, because even eight times more drunk between the two of them, Clarissa still comes to her rescue.  
  
Clarissa storms over with her perfect high heels clacking on the floor and snaps, “I wanna go home!”  
  
Alex nearly leaps to her feet, pulling away from the boy. “You are so bossy,” she plays along. After another once-over, she's actually glad to be taking Clarissa away from anymore drinks. “Come on, Drunky.”  
  
“Wait,” Eddie insists, standing too. He steps closer. So does Clarissa. “Let me get your number.”  
  
“I'm _tired,”_ Clarissa complains, and makes a show of grabbing Alex's wrist. Alex escapes with her, a hasty retreat with nothing more than a quiet 'sorry, man,' over her shoulder.  
  
Outside is cold, the air a refreshing sort of piercing that fills up her lungs with ice. Snow crunches under their footsteps as they walk to the bus stop. Alex does not know where Clarissa's over-crowded student-house is, and Clarissa just rolls her eyes and insists _the night is young,_ when Alex asks. She falls asleep on her shoulder on the bus ride back to Alex's dorm, but wakes up again with impressive ease.  
  
After that, for some reason, she is wide-awake and chatty as can be. Alex takes her for a short walk around the building, not wanting to keep poor Maya up with Clarissa's energy. They have to take a break at a bench, half-way back, when Clarissa's heels are hurting her too badly to go on.  
  
“What was your plan for if you stayed out later?” Alex asks, laughing.  
  
“Have someone carry me, obviously,” Clarissa says. Alex is not entirely sure she's joking. The redhead shivers, and pulls her feet up, toes curling over the edge of the bench. Her shoes sit on the pavement below them. Alex thinks this might make a good photograph. The College Experience Cut Short. “Or go home with someone else.”

There is not much sound from the dorms at this hour. Loud music and dorm-parties are a good way to get in trouble with the on-site dorm supervisors, and they are more strict than Alex had expected. Or maybe she had just forgotten that weed is not legal everywhere, and back home is just particularly relaxed.  
  
Clarissa leans into Alex's shoulder as if she is going to doze off again, but asks, “you homesick?”  
  
Alex hesitates. There is a sea of _yes_ inside her that is not her own.  
  
“Sort of. I like travel and all, but...” She thinks of the sound of the ocean and the view of the waves. She thinks of the salty air and the endless wind. She thinks of the path up to the lighthouse and the smell of dirt. Of kitschy shops lining the street by the pier, of old town, of walking to the convenience store at two am with Ren in the Summer. Of Michael's room and sunlight through the window and the particular way it catches dust in the air. (When she was six years old he had told her they were dust-fairies, and convinced her they had blessed his room to be warmer than hers.)  
  
She thinks of Jonas, and of the daydreams she has, near-daily, about simple things. Things like showing him her dorm, like whispering to him about the people they pass in the halls. Walking down sunny streets together and shopping at strip-malls. She thinks of bringing him to these parties, that seem more like his scene than hers.  
  
They have texted, while she is gone. But it is stilted and short. He is doing well in school, but is anxious after dropping a classes. The house is empty without her, and their parents both miss her terribly. This is as much as she gets from him. She can't complain, because all he gets from her is that she is doing well in school, although she still procrastinates terribly. The dorm feels more like Maya's space than her own with the uneven amount of belongings and furniture they've contributed, but it isn't bad. And...  
  
“I want to go home,” Alex murmurs. “But I want to do it with the freedom to come back out here, and to go other places, too.”  
  
Clarissa snickers. “You're just greedy and want vacations all the time.”  
  
“I miss the ocean. I can't imagine settling down very far from it.”  
  
“Buy the Adler house.”  
  
“Yeah, that seems realistic.”  
  
Clarissa shrugs, shoulder digging into Alex painfully, but she does not move away. After a long silence, Clarissa whispers, “I don't want to go home.”  
  
“For winter break?”  
  
“At all.”  
  
“Well,” Alex says. She looks up at the stars, almost just to avoid looking at Clarissa's face. The ghosts feel strangely about this. There is guilt and there is pride. There is confusion, and there is resentment. They are children, still, quite often. They love Clarissa, but it was their love of her that dug out deep holes inside her. “You don't have to.”  
  
“I miss Nona.”  
  
Alex shivers. “Yeah.”  
  
“And she's not even visiting home during our winter break, so why should I? I don't want to be by the water, my sister won't be there, my parents suck, everyone else in Camena sucks. You gotta get out of there, Alex. You gotta go – to Seattle or something.”  
  
That's a thought.  
  
“Oh,” Clarissa says, a bit belatedly. “Sorry. No offense. Not _everyone_ in Camena sucks. Like... Jonas is chill.”  
  
“Yeah,” Alex says again. She is out of words. She is tired and can feel the cool air sucking away her buzz.  
  
When she was growing up, she didn't want to move away. She remembers everyone around her repeating the same dreams – grow up, get out. Camena can't be it, there's nothing there. Nothing exciting, nothing fun. But she had liked it. It was home. Alex may have always been adventurous, but she's also always known what she likes and how to stick with it. Maybe she's just clingy.  
  
Moving away doesn't sound so bad anymore.  
  
They are silent so long that maybe Clarissa really does fall asleep. She stirs slightly, her head hung and hair tickling Alex's arm.  
  
“I really loved Michael. You know that, right?”  
  
“I don't need to know it for it to matter,” Alex says. Then, quieter, “but yeah. I know. Of course I know.”  
  
“Even though I've been seeing other guys?”  
  
Alex rolls her eyes. “Of _course._ You don't – your life doesn't end when...” _When his does._ She bites the inside of her cheek. _“_ It's good to move on, Clarissa. It doesn't mean you loved him any less.”

“Okay. Hey Alex?”  
  
“Yeah?”  
  
“You know he was proud of you. He'd be proud of you. Going to school and stuff. And you should see boys too. Not that one, obviously, but. You know. Boys.” Alex does not get a chance to reply before Clarissa yawns and says, “I'm tired.”  
  
“Alright. Let's get you into bed.”  
  
(Back in the dorm room, Clarissa crawls into Alex's bed with a stream of complaints, stretching out up against the wall and leaving very little room for Alex beside her. Maya only wakes up briefly, thinks their fussing is hilarious, and goes back to sleep.)  
  
In the morning Clarissa takes her out for a McDonald's breakfast and tells her “sorry for being so – whatever – last night.”  
  
Alex shoves half a hash-brown in her mouth and talks through it. “D'n worry 'bout it.”  
  
“I think I'm gonna stay here. Over winter break, I mean.”  
  
“Yeah?”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
Alex looks at her phone. Ren has messaged her, as per usual. Jonas has not. And she would like to blame the ghosts for the draw she feels to Clarissa, but it isn't them. They are just friends now. They're finally friends, and she cares about her.  
  
“I was thinking,” Alex says, though this is a lie, the thought only crossing her mind as she voices it, “maybe me too.”  
  
Clarissa looks skeptical. “I think you should visit. Ren will be there. Aren't you missing your boys?”  
  
“Of course I am. Of course. But...” She doesn't want to face Jonas. It sounds so childish and pathetic. But maybe if she stays here longer she can move on from this. Maybe there will be another party, another boy, another kiss, and Jonas will not feel like her missing other half.  
  
Maybe, she thinks, the same goes for him. Maybe another term will be a blessing, from her to him. Without her to distract him, maybe there will be other girls. She can't imagine it any other way.  
  
They just need time apart.

***  
  
The dorms are near-empty for the break. There are a few stragglers like her. They exchange awkward waves in context-less solidarity in the halls. Alex likes this. She likes not knowing why the others stayed, and likes them not knowing her reasons. Here, no one knows about Michael or about Jonas or about anything else she has to cover up at home.  
  
Clarissa is not able to schedule a class with her for the upcoming term, but the two of them meet for lunch or breakfast most weeks.  
  
It snows. The whole city seems to come to a halt , buried the same way it would be back in Camena. The ghosts sleep. Sometimes Alex thinks it is because it is too bright for their shadows, with the sun glaring off the ice and snow. Or maybe it's that they have no familiar hosts to rile them up, no traces of home to spark the indignation. Whatever it is, they are blissfully quiet.

(Clarissa refuses to build a snowman, but she makes Alex hot chocolate when she has finished making one herself, and kicks her roommates off the couch to make room for them to bundle up under blankets.)  
  
Alex's mother is disappointed, but a few phone calls seem to soothe her well enough. She misses Alex, but by now she has gotten used to having a quieter house. And she has Jonas' dad – not to mention Jonas himself – so she isn't all alone.  
  
Ren calls her to chew her out, but it's in good fun. She knew he would be upset, and so she had hidden that she was staying in all their text exchanges. He only finds out when he shows up on her mother's doorstep. She can hear Jonas in the background, mumbling, “really, she didn't tell you?”  
  
They talk for over four hours. Ren plops himself down in Jonas' bedroom while they catch up. She knows this because she sometimes hears her own mother knocking on the door to offer him food, and Jonas, playfully asking why he is still there and when he is leaving. She can tell from his tone, that he's glad, though.  
  
Ren asks, near the end of the call, “oh, do you wanna talk to Jonas?”  
  
She hesitates, and in the background of the call Jonas goes silent; something loud clatters to the floor.  
  
“No,” she lies. “I'm good.”  
  
She misses them and she misses home. But she is glad she did not go.  
  
She spends Christmas in the common room, watching holiday-special-marathons with a couple other girls. They order pizza. It's pretty awesome in its own way.  
  
Her mom sends her a care package for Christmas, though it arrives a couple of days late. It has some spending money, socks and underwear, a cute stationary set that really doesn't suit her, and a huge box of the polar-bear sugar cookies that Ren used to love. Alex still likes them, even after the recipe change. She hasn't had them in an eternity, and shares them with Clarissa and Maya.

Another part of the care package is a stuffed animal. Not a teddy-bear or a duck, or even a beaver – but a one-eyed monster with horns and stubby arms. Alex loves him, even before she sees the tag with Jonas' name scribbled on it in sharpie.  
  
Jonas calls her. 11:55 pm on December 31st. She has to step outside of the party-house to escape the music. There are still people all around on the porch, but she knows they are too drunk to eavesdrop, too stranger to care to.

She leans on the banister. She hears his bed creaking underneath him and the sound of his breathing, too-close to the mic.  
  
“Uh, hey,” he says, after an awkwardly long moment of silence.  
  
Alex whispers, “hey.”  
  
“You at a party?” Jonas asks, apparently hearing the muffled music in the distance or the chatter that still spills out each window. He asks it like he's looking for an excuse to hang up.  
  
“Yeah, but it's whatever. I don't know anyone here.”  
  
“You with Clarissa?”  
  
“Not this time. Maya invited me out.” It is with a wave of sadness that Alex realizes they speak so infrequently that she needs to add, “my roommate.”  
  
“Ah.”  
  
“What about you,” she tries. Her elbows ache, digging too hard into wooden hand railing. She already knows, but asks, “you out?”  
  
He reminds her, “time difference. So, not yet, but I'll head out in a bit with Ren. I just wanted to–”

–fireworks go off. Down the street, in the back yard, and blocks away. Illegal, bright, and _loud_. Inside, the music is suddenly louder, the chatter replaced with cheers and screams. She hears bottles clinking together, hears a couple shatter. She hears camera shutters and balloons popping. A window upstairs slams open, pouring all the sounds straight down over her.  
  
Alex laughs. She has been drinking, and it is unifying to feel everyone welcome the new year together. It is a celebration of the passing of _time,_ and what could be more amazing than that? What could be better than feeling what everyone else is feeling, all together at once, happily parting ways with the past and facing the uncertainty of tomorrow with the invincibility of youth and drunkenness?  
  
And she laughs because she is so glad to hear Jonas' voice, and talking to him feels so natural and easy. Why don't they always talk? Why don't they text, why doesn't she call him to chat when she is waiting for buses? Why don't they talk before bed, why don't they say good morning every day?  
  
_Time,_ the ghosts are sighing, still sleepy and hazy with her intoxication. _Time, and love, and time.  
  
_ She hears Jonas chuckle, a low sound. There is no way he can't hear the party, now, and no way he does not think Alex is a giggling drunk idiot. The sound of his acceptance is warm. She wonders if she said any of that out loud.  
  
Not knowing only makes her laugh again.  
  
Jonas says, “happy new year, Alex.”  
  
He sounds like there is more he wants to say, but doesn't. She waits for a moment, because she wants to hear it this time. She wants to. He doesn't say it.  
  
“Do good in school,” she tells him. “Don't slack off!”  
  
“You either,” he retorts, sniffing in feigned offense.  
  
Alex tries to tell him, “I'll see you during spring break, okay?” But the fireworks are going off again. Party-goers are rushing outside to see them, the door slamming open and shut and all their over-loud conversations following them, volume only rising and rising to fight the _boom_ after the light.  
  
She doesn't really hear his response. She isn't even sure he heard her. But Maya bumps shoulders with her, and she near-thoughtlessly hangs up her phone to watch the fireworks with her.  
  
***  
  
The next term goes the same. Sometimes Alex sees Eddie in the library when she is nursing a headache and an anxiety attack over the latest assignment, and she considers making some sort of peace offering. Maybe she could share her aspirin or printing credits. College currency. The thought makes her giggle, laughing down over her binder.

She almost wants to text this joke to Jonas, but holds off. She and Jonas don't talk any more often than they did before. Nothing really changed. Besides, talking about boys, even if they are working to move past each other, may still be a bit taboo.  
  
This hurts, but Alex still thinks it is for the better, and scolds her drunken self for remembering love as if it was all fine.  
  
The ghosts surge at the thought, sudden and resentful, as jarring as a flat-line. Their intrusions are so rare, lately, but still strong.  
  
Books fall from the shelves behind her like a child's tantrum. She hears someone else's laptop shut itself off, fans abruptly whirring to a stop. She prays that they had saved what they were working on, she prays that she did not ruin someone's day. And she apologizes to the ghosts, though it is half hearted and with a roll of her eyes as she stands up to re-shelf the books.  
  
Nudging things like this, without electricity, is new. She does not find it alarming. What they can do together grows and grows as they meld into one. A part of her thinks the new year is one year closer to death, closer to the end of the world, closer to whatever morbid end exists. She is that much closer to being the same as them.  
  
Maybe that's why she can do this now.  
  
On the other side of the shelf, Natalie is picking up more of the fallen books. Alex suspects mostly to be close to the student librarian – Gwen, a pretty blonde hipster with predictably thick-rimmed glasses. Complete contrast to Natalie, who is all messy hair and ratty hoodies.  
  
Gwen shivers as she takes them from Natalie one-by-one, sliding them back into place. “It hasn't been happening, like, all the time. But it's more than any of the last years _I've_ been here. It's like this place is haunted.”  
  
Alex tries to be inconspicuous, eavesdropping shamelessly.  
  
“Here, too?” Natalie asks, and laughs.  
  
Gwen startles. “What do you mean?”  
  
“Oh, there's. Just... I heard some guys talking about the ghost in boy's dorm. Makes lights flicker and turn off. They've had the wiring and bulbs and everything checked like a dozen times.”  
  
“Oh, whatever.”  
  
“I kind of believe it,” Natalie whispers. Alex has finished putting all the books back on this side of the shelf and now she has no excuse for lingering. Even so, she wills the ghosts to quiet, even as they stir up inside of her. “Last Friday was Nico's birthday, you know? And we had a party at my place. And his girlfriend, um. Rachel, I think? I guess everyone thought everyone else had told her, so she totally missed it.”  
  
Gwen snorts.  
  
“Seriously. So, like, she goes to his dorm to surprise him.”

“Ooh-la-la.”  
  
“Right. So – anyway, she gets there, and his roommate tells her what's up. And she's cool, you know how cool she is, so she's just like _that's okay, babe,_ _I'_ _ll be here when you come home._ Like, not mad, but trying to get him to come home for some birthday sex.”  
  
“Ew, what about his roommate?”  
  
“Andy? Oh, Rachel caught him on his way out. He's always got somewhere to be, you know.”  
  
“Oh, okay. So, wait, how is this a ghost story?”  
  
“No, no. So, like. She's texting him, and he's showing all of us while we're playing king's cup. And she's like _I'm hearing spooky noises, I'm so scared all alone! Sad-face._ And Nico is like _oh, yeah, that's the dorm-ghost._ And she's like, getting more and more freaked out, sending him all this stuff, like that the radio turned itself on and the faucet kept dripping and she'd turn it off and it would start again ten minutes later.”  
  
“Oh my God.”  
  
“Yeah, so, then Nico _gets shitfaced_ and doesn't even go home. We tried to get him off the couch but he was _out_. When we were trying to get up he was like _no it's haunted. You want my dick, don't talk to me about ghosts!_ ”  
  
“Nico...”  
  
“Anyway. If it was enough for him to pass on birthday sex with Rachel, I'm inclined to believe him.”  
  
Alex hears Gwen muttering, “he is so ridiculous,” as she returns back to her work station.  
  
_She_ is ridiculous, she thinks. For the way that a part of her thinks _how exciting! A new friend!_ And for the part of her that cannot stop thinking of ways to get into the boy's dorm. As she finishes her work, she eyes Eddie across the room.  
  
***  
  
They aren't _really_ ghosts, Alex reminds herself, laying in the dark of her dorm room at half past midnight. It was a rift, it was radiation. It was the waves. It lets them play with reality, toy with threads of time like they are physical. It let them, _forced_ them, to leave their bodies.  
  
They aren't _really_ dead, they just... Fell into a reality rift and exited in her time instead of their own.  
  
Alex presses her fingertips together, and sighs. God.  
  
They haven't calmed since the mention of the ghost in the boy's dorm. Their winter hibernation, if it could be called that, is over. They send power through her veins like they are trying to jump-start her into action. Like pumping the gas to get her moving, she feels them push and push like they want to force red out of her eye sockets.

She doesn't let them, but it is getting harder and harder to fight the temptation to go check it out. Who is to say that she can do anything to communicate with a proper-ghost? If that's even what it is.  
  
Before last term, Alex wouldn't have dared tread this subject with Clarissa. But she asks her over lunch one day, “I want to look into the ghost in the boy's dorm, but you need a guy to let you in if you don't have a key card. I don't know if I want to go up to anyone and go _hey, let me into your dorm and then leave me unattended,_ you know?”  
  
“Bet you could buy a spare ID card from someone,” Clarissa says, almost instantly. She sips at her soda with an impressive elegance. Alex often thinks that Clarissa is the picture of a New York girl. Then again, she's only been here for a couple of months. She isn't the best judge of that. At Alex's surprised look, Clarissa rolls her eyes. “What? It's what all the guys do to get their girlfriends in the buildings. It's like five bucks to get a replacement if you say you lost yours.”  
  
“You think that'd work? I feel like I don't know any guys here well enough to offer them five bucks to trespass in their name.”  
  
“Oh, it'll be more than that. There's a bit of a black market situation.”  
  
“Why do you know so much about this?”  
  
Clarissa wordlessly flips open her wallet to flash her own ID – and a boy named Eric Knott's.  
  
“You're amazing,” Alex blurts out. “Let me borrow that!”  
  
“Ah-ah,” Clarissa says, and her lips quirk upwards. “This is _your_ quest, and I'm not a part of it. I'm not going to stop you or anything, but I'm not big on your ghost adventures.”  
  
Alex plays as if to grab the wallet from her hands, missing on purpose as Clarissa pulls it back.  
  
“I could probably get in with Eddie,” Alex ponders.  
  
“Thought you didn't like him.”  
  
Alex tries to hide her discomfort, not just with talking about boys, but with talking boys to _Clarissa_ , of all people. The girl who was most openly cruel to her, out of the entire town. Michael's ex girlfriend. She loves this, but a part of her misses Ren terribly in times when she wants someone to confide in. She vows to text him about it later.  
  
“He's... Okay. Maybe not best to have our first flirt be when he's been drinking way more than me.”  
  
Clarissa shrugs. “Get some then.”  
  
“Ew, Clarissa, I don't – I just need a guy to let me into the dorms and then they need to leave me alone.”  
  
“Dear, your priorities disgust me.”  
  
***  
  
Eddie really _is_ very cute. Alex sits down with him in the library a couple of days later, late in the evening. His hair is mussed from being toyed with too much. He looks absolutely miserable over a math textbook, and she sets a can of starbucks vanilla coffee on the table for him. They're her favorite.  
  
“Hey,” she says, awkwardly realizing that she has no idea how to flirt. And no idea if he even likes this drink. Or if he is going to look at her in complete disdain.  
  
He does not. He blinks up at her, then looks back to the can curiously. When she nods, he cracks a small smile. “Thanks. It was Alex, right?”  
  
“Yeah. I just wanted to say sorry. About the party.”  
  
He blushes, and Alex is almost startled by how much drinking had opened him up compared to this. “It's okay. Your friend needed you. And I was being – weird. Bad day. You know how it is.”  
  
She does not, but she can imagine Clarissa understanding, and so she nods. “It's cool.”  
  
He is a junior – and an English major, like Clarissa. This makes it somewhat easier to chat, because she can draw from things Clarissa has said. She is honest about it, never trying to claim she knows more than she does. He tells her his family is in New Jersey, and talks about the books he likes.  
  
It's interesting. They don't have much in common, but she enjoys listening to him talk, and he listens to her when she interjects. Even if it isn't often. She does not have as much to say. She doesn't want to talk about home, about the friends she misses, about her ghosts, and these things are so much of her life. All of it.

She is so used to being best friends with Ren that it is hard to understand where this conversation with Eddie stops being friendly and becomes flirty. Talking to him comes naturally, like it does with Ren. It isn't giddy or exciting, it doesn't give her butterflies in a warm-mush stomach like with Jonas.  
  
It is still somewhat thrilling to bump her knee against his; to leave it there.

She nearly forgets her mission, too caught up in the pitfalls of socializing, until Eddie starts to gather his things and says, “It's getting pretty late. I need to head back to the dorms and wind down.” Something must show on her face, because he pauses, and his face goes red again as he asks, “want to, um. Come up? With me? I don't know if you smoke, but I've got–”

“–I can hang out for a bit,” Alex says.

When they get back to the dorms, the two of them sit on his bed. His roommate is there, an effeminate boy named Dustin, with tattoos up both his arms. His first words are, “you want tv rights? I've been watching shit all day.” Then “oh, and uh, hey girlie.”  
  
Alex introduces herself as Eddie shrugs. Despite his indifference he winds up with the remote on his lap and Dustin tugging headphones on across the room.

Eddie puts on some action flick on netflix, and Alex sits beside him, only half-watching. It is hard to pay attention to the movie with his thigh touching hers. She does not let him catch her staring, but he can probably feel it. She can feel when he is staring at her.  
  
If Alex is honest, the idea of sex kind of scares her. Being a virgin doesn't make up much of that worry. Mostly the concern is that she makes electronics freak out when her emotions surge, who knows what will happen with something like... That. Something that she is not alone in, not entirely in control of.

She is not here to sleep with Eddie, she assures herself. She does not really want to.

Dustin does not know this. Dustin leaves the room, somehow completely casual as he tosses out, “I'll be back in like two hours.”  
  
This time Alex lets Eddie kiss her. This time his breath smells like weed, and this time his knuckles brush the side of her leg. She likes the way he leans in. The movie playing across the room from them flicks to a blue screen, then right back. Half the ghosts are silent in hopeful anticipation. All of them are desperate for her to love, for love through her. But another half of them are fussing and fretting, a surreal mix of nervousness and over-investment.  
  
Her mind blanks. The new ghost is briefly gone from her mind. It's – nice. It's nice not to think. Just for a moment, it's nice for the world to only be soft lips pressed shyly against hers.  
  
She wishes her mind would stay blank. Instead she thinks of Jonas, and then she is so distracted, reminding herself that it's not like it's a big deal to have someone else on the mind - this guy here isn't asking to be her _boyfriend_ , Jesus, he probably just wants to get laid.  
  
Does she want to?  
  
Her phone vibrates in her back pocket before she realizes what she's doing.  
  
Eddie pulls back with half-lidded eyes, his hair tickling her forehead for a moment before he draws farther away.

The screen is scrambled. Half of one slide and half of another. There is no sign of an alert or a message. She knows that it was her ghosts that conjured it. She pretends it was a text, and in her quick 'reply,' she texts Jonas _call me_.  
  
She glances at the clock. It's nearly midnight here, so it isn't too late to ask that of him. It's strange to think that they are in different times.  
  
“Everything alright?” Eddie asks, voice hushed.  
  
“Yeah, just... A friend,” she lies.  
  
“Getting interrupted again,” Eddie murmurs, leaning in close again. “Starting to think there's a reason.”

She looks at him carefully, searching for any malice or anger. He is just joking, she determines, and laughs quietly. He cracks a smile and tries kiss her again. Something about this bothers her. He is nice. She likes him a fair amount.  
  
But she should not have to be second-guessing his anger and motivations. She doesn't want to kiss someone she knows so little of.  
  
Her phone vibrates again. She ignores it at first for appearances, allowing it to vibrate a second time before answering.  
  
Jonas' voice is urgent with worry. “Alex? Are you alright?”  
  
“Hey, Jonas. It's okay,” she says into the receiver, and gives Eddie an apologetic smile. It is sincere, even if she constructed the situation. She is not entirely sure she can say she was leading him on. Not when she really does think he's cute. Not when she sincerely considered sleeping with him, and exploring for ghosts _afterwards_. She whispers, putting her hand over the mic of her phone just for show, “God, I... I have to go. I'm so sorry, man.”  
  
Eddie, to his credit, just gives her a sort of lop-sided grin. He is visibly disappointed, but not angry. He tells her, “see you around?”  
  
She nods, smiles one more time, and leaves his dorm.  
  
“Who was that?” Jonas asks. “What's – do you need something?”  
  
“Want to come on an adventure?” Alex whispers, rushing down the dark halls to the stairwell.  
  
She can hear the smile in his voice. “What are you up to?”  
  
“Ghost hunting.”  
  
“I'd think you've had enough of that.”  
  
“I have, I have, but...” She feels like a ninja, sneaking through places she shouldn't be. Less so when she smells pot, hears video-games beeping and boys chatting through closed doors. “I don't know. Maybe I can help.”  
  
At the stairwell she has to pull her phone away to double check what floor. She gathered from Natalie that Nico's room is on the fifth floor. Two up. She doesn't know where the RA are or if they do security checks. She should get off the phone, but can't bear to.  
  
Instead she says, “it might not even be anything.”  
  
“Who knows. It's a lot easier to fall for ghost stories, these days.”  
  
It's like no time has passed. It's like he's right beside her. “What are _you_ up to?”  
  
“Reading. Stuff for class. Hey, Alex?”  
  
“Yeah?”  
  
“Stay safe.”  
  
“Always. Hey, so. Stairs are a bitch. You talk.”  
  
“Uh – I don't know what to...”  
  
“Don't care.”  
  
For lack of anything better, he reads his history text-book to her. Even with her fondness of history, Alex has a hard time taking in anything it says. But as she reaches the fifth floor he says, “this is way easier to take in when I read out loud,” so at least it's good for something.  
  
Alex laughs under her breath and lets him give himself a lesson on the civil war. It's nice just to hear him.  
  
The fifth floor doesn't have nearly as many occupied rooms. She can tell from the light spilling out from under fewer doors. (Alex refuses to believe anyone could sleep this early.)  
  
The supposedly haunted room is just two doors down from Nico's. This means she cannot feasibly kick it down without alerting people. Maybe they would blame the ghost. If she did get caught she could always just jump back, but that doesn't solve the problem. How to get in to a locked room.  
  
Alex interrupts Jonas' reading as she crouches down to look at the keyhole, “I wish you were here.”  
  
He doesn't seem to comprehend her at first, continuing his sentence until it comes to a stuttering halt. “Oh,” he manages, “uh–”  
  
“–So you could pick this lock,” she rushes to say, belatedly realizing how that sounded.  
  
“Can't you just – I don't know. Break down the door and rewind time from inside the room?”  
  
“Doesn't work like that.”  
  
“Have the, uh, your guests do it?”  
  
Alex blinks. If she can push books off a bookshelf what's to stop her from moving some lock mechanisms? “Oh,” she says, because it suddenly occurs to her that she probably could have gotten into the building that way to begin with. In fact, those card-scanners would probably be _easier_ than a traditional lock. Weird that ghosts from so long ago are more tech savvy than not.  
  
Oh well. She doesn't mind. It was nice to spend time with Eddie. She doesn't really want to undo any of that, even with the awkward cut off.

It takes time to open the lock. She isn't sure what locks look like on the inside, and the small tug and pull is difficult for something so solid. It would be easier to shatter windows, to short the whole building. It takes a concentrated effort to keep her phone working, and even so it statics up and cuts out a couple times through Jonas' vaguely distracted reading.  
  
The faint click is her go-ahead, and Alex lets herself inside. It's a standard dorm room. Just like hers had looked like before she unpacked her posters and spread piles of laundry across the floor. Near-empty, with nothing but some trash in a corner and an abandoned wood desk.  
  
“Do you need to go?” Jonas asks, as Alex closes the door behind her. He sounds equal parts desperate to hang up and pleading that she does not.

She takes a moment to respond. The room feels strange. There is static on the line that is not her own, but she can quiet it as if it were. There is a fuzz in her head, like a squiggly line drawn through her middle, separating her from her passengers.  
  
“I don't want to. We're like – you're my ghost-finding buddy.”  
  
He sighs. In relief? She isn't sure.  
  
She whispers, “I might need to, though. I'm going to do the thing and I don't know how that's going to work over the phone.”  
  
“The thing.”  
  
“The – pocket. Thing. The box.”  
  
“Oh,” Jonas says. “Okay.”  
  
Somehow the walls make it easier. The nice cube of the room is easy to feel out, like dragging shadows up from the ground, up the walls. She wishes she had her radio, if not just as something to focus on, a dial to turn as if it were what controls any of this.  
  
The chatter from nearby rooms stops on a dime. She's pulled furniture here, too, or maybe this space is between times, now. There is a dresser, now, drawers disheveled and unfolded clothes dangling out.  
  
Jonas is still on the line. So is someone else. Another voice in their phone call.  
  
The stranger is tired at best, emotionless at worst. He sounds their age beneath a layer of static. “How did you do that? What are you doing here?”  
  
“Oh God,” Jonas blurts out, startled.  
  
“I'm here to talk to you,” Alex says, as gently as she can.

It tries to turn the light on, tries to burst the bulb. She doesn't let it. Her ghosts laugh, because this is nothing to them, and this is their space right now.  
  
“I'm just going to throw out there, this is _really_ stressful to do long-distance. Like, not that I'm saying it's more stressful than being there, but.”  
  
Alex ignores him. Instead she asks, “how come you're only in the waves? Can you... Can I see you?”  
  
The line squeals, a high pitched shriek that pierces her ears so badly that Alex yanks the phone away from her ear until it stops, groaning.  
  
She has to guess, without him giving her a proper answer. Her only idea is that he isn't as strong as her ghosts. Makes sense. There are ninety seven of them and only one of him. No hosts. He is younger, _fresher_.  
  
“Okay, okay, taking that as a no. Use your words, kiddo.”  
  
“Kiddo,” the ghost responds, still just as dispassionate. “ _Kiddo_ ,” it repeats, slowly, like it is feeling out the word.  
  
Jonas still sounds pained from the screech, but asks, “why are you hanging around a dorm?”  
  
“Why are you?” It asks back, almost accusatory. “Kiddo.”  
  
_Kiddo_ the ghosts seethe, _this child, this infant,_ and Alex has to push them back down before they short out her cell phone.  
  
“Like I said, I came here to talk to you. I wanted to see why you're here. How long you've been here. If I can help. That sort of stuff.”  
  
“And you?” it asks Jonas.  
  
“Uh,” Jonas says. “I'm just. A partner in crime I guess.”  
  
It repeats, with interest, “crime.”  
  
“Just – as a saying,” Jonas clarifies. “We're... Ghost-finding buddies.”  
  
“Clearly.”  
  
“Yeah, see? That's how you know you can trust me. I've already got nearly a hundred success stories on finding ghosts.”  
  
“Three more for the grand prize,” Jonas drawls.  
  
“Two more,” Alex corrects. “What do you say?”  
  
“What prize?” It asks, suspicious.  
  
“That was a joke. There's no prize. And I got all these fuckers all at once. I just want to help.”  
  
There is quiet. The room is ordinary, when Alex surveys it, in a very surreal way. The moon outside the window is a stark contrast to the sky.  
  
“I just want to go home,” the ghost murmurs. “I just wanted to see my... Friend. He couldn't make it. So I saw him. And now I just want to go home.”  
  
There are flashes in Alex's mind, fast as camera shutters. A plane, winter vacation, a metro accident and blood, a crowd onlooking. A family mourning, gone so fast Alex doesn't get a good look at them behind her eyelids, but she knows this, she knows what this is like and her eyes sting. A funeral, and the family, and more family, and classmates, students. She sees the seats full and sees them empty, blinking rapidly between the two.  
  
And then the trains again, and the dorms, and this room, and – a different boy. One she feels like she's seen before, not spoken to, but passed in the halls. (It's too fast to know, and the halls are so crowded here, not like out on the Oregon coast, population: fucking nothing.) Hunched over in his bed, curled in on himself in a tight ball. Alex knows this. This is familiar. When your grief is so vast but your body feels so hollow that you try to shrink down and condense everything into a tiny, diamond-hard core of longing.  
  
Jonas lets out a pained hiss that startles Alex out of the visions. He must have had them too, and says, “I'm not sure I get it.”  
  
“You died visiting home,” Alex questions, “and came back to see your friend?”  
  
_Just like us,_ the ghosts murmur. They tell her, not in words or even pictures, that after his death he had done what they did. Found a host to bring them back. Maybe it's easier for them to decipher the memories. Like a frequency Alex can't tune right into by herself.  
  
Only he's just one ghost, and he's without the radiation boost. He couldn't possess, not like they had tried to do. Could only leech.  
  
“Your friend couldn't make it to the funeral?”  
  
“It was far,” the ghost says. Emotion is slowly returning to his voice until he sounds like anyone that she could have a phone-call with. Not like a disembodied dead boy who's forgotten how to feel anything. “Home in Los Angeles. Not a lot of school friends could make it.”  
  
“A funeral isn't everything,” Alex whispers. “It doesn't mean anything about your loss.”  
  
The line is so quiet, without even white noise, without even Jonas breathing, that she pulls it back to check that her call is still going. The screen still lights up, Jonas' name and photo coming up above a glitched out timer as it loops from eleven minutes, twenty-three seconds to twenty-four seconds and back.  
  
She puts the phone back to her ear.  
  
The ghost whispers, “I know. I just... Wanted to see August. I thought... Forever.”  
  
“You have to move on.”  
  
“ _He_ did,” the ghost says, bitter. “I was with him, but I was alone, and he... Just gets back up. Keeps going.”  
  
Alex nearly snaps, “there's no other option!”  
  
Her phone screams in static again and Jonas groans in protest. It sounds like a high-frequency sob.  
  
“ _Oh, quiet down._ _How long have you even been dead?_ ” Alex hears herself asking, but her voice is wrong. It isn't hers. It echoes, the inflection fluctuating wildly like a fight for control. She sees through a red curtain and internally curses herself and her ghosts for it.  
  
After just a moment she knows that she could take control back, but she gives them slack, anyway. If she doesn't let the ghosts talk to other ghosts, how cruel a host is she?  
  
She lets the sunken passengers ask, like they are rolling their collective eyes, “ _One, two years?_ _And you think the world is cruel for spinning on without you?_ _You aren't_ trapped _. You choose to stay. Don't like what you see? Then leave. You have the luxury._ _”  
  
_ “Long time no see,” Jonas says, dryly. “You haven't changed much.”  
  
But they have, Alex thinks, with a vague, ridiculous sort of pride. They are still so articulate when they have control of her mouth.  
  
“ _And these ones are no better,”_ they say, with a sort of mental nod as if Jonas were there to regard, as if they could motion to Alex from inside her. “ _They say move_ _on_ _? This one doesn't love anything_ but _the dead.”  
  
_ The young ghost has no words for this. Jonas doesn't either. Alex is grateful for the excuse to be silent.  
_  
_ Alex thinks of Clarissa on her shoulder, drunk and cold at two am. The ghosts quiet, and then without her efforts they recede back like a tide inside of her. She has to flex her fingers so she doesn't drop her phone, and nearly falls to her knees with numb legs.

“I don't like agreeing with them,” Jonas says, tentative after a long pause to make sure no one else is going to speak. “But... If you can leave why wouldn't you? The living have to move on. We've got no choice.”  
  
“But it was painful, right?” Alex asks the young ghost. “Trying to hold on and having to watch. That's why you stayed here instead of with him when you could have kept using him as an anchor.”  
  
Quiet. Then, “I was alone. I just want to go home to see my family off.”  
  
_Lucky_ , her ghosts say inside her, vaguely annoyed.  
  
Jonas asks, “why haven't you gone,” because he does not know how these things work. Alex doesn't blame him. She hardly does, herself. “Do you even know how to – do you just decide to poof or what?”  
  
“I could leave,” The ghost says, wearily. “But I'm not going without seeing my family. And I don't know how to get there. I can only... Occupy spaces. Rooms. People. There was no path.”  
  
“I'll take you.” Alex blurts out.  
  
She almost expects another ungodly screech, but instead she can hear a sound not unlike the ghost breathing, even though she knows he doesn't need to. She can tell it apart from Jonas.  
  
“How?”  
  
“You said Los Angeles, right? I'll – go there. I'll take you home.”  
  
This time Jonas is the one to question it, though he sounds more amused than skeptical. “And how are you going to do that, Alex?”  
  
“Spring break. I'll have mom let me buy the tickets for my flight home. Find one with a long layover in LA.”  
  
“You're serious?” It is not really a question.  
  
“I think you'll... I'll lose you, if I'm your host,” Alex says. “They're stronger than you, so they'll – you know... Take you over.” She feels the air of the room twist unnaturally; a ghost's cautious nod. “So, uh... Hm.”  
  
They are all three quiet for a long moment. The ghosts are a stir of hushed sound, insisting they will take him, but Alex knows it is their greed to take the feelings and memories that are so fresh to him.  
  
“Your phone,” Jonas says, eventually. “Can he just like... Chill in your phone?”  
  
Her guests insist that the waves are for communication, to ghosts; that's how he can speak through it to begin with. But it isn't a _place_ or a _person_ to be sailed. Their bitching and moaning only heightens when Alex excitedly says, “I don't see why that wouldn't work. Haunting a room is haunting four walls, a floor, a roof. Why not a phone? I mean, same basic shape, right?”  
  
Jonas laughs. Her favorite sound. Incredulous, but vaguely impressed. “I _don't_ think that's how it works.”  
  
“Oh, what do you know?” Alex huffs, but fails to keep the laughter from her own voice.  
  
She feels the ghost experiment with the idea. The air flows in a spiral, like she's at the eye of a slow-motion tornado. Or like her cell phone is. Her hair blows across her face; she hears Jonas make a curious sound as the winds blow into the receiver.  
  
Then she has him. She can feel her phone as a focal point, familiar like a radio. It vibrates in her hand as if he is squirming to get comfortable inside of it.  
  
The ghost says, shyly, “I'm Justin.”  
  
“Alex.”  
  
“Not that it matters, honestly, but Jonas.”  
  
“I'll get you home, Justin,” Alex promises.  
  
It's easier to leave this pocket than the last. Maybe because she made it on purpose. She just has to concentrate, has to use what isn't borrowed anymore, but what is hers. Close the box she's drawn around them and jump back into the linear flow of time. Easy.  
  
She is standing outside the room, staring at a locked door. When she looks at her phone it has been just over thirty minutes since she went into the room.  
  
“We all still here?” Alex asks.  
  
Jonas mumbles a vaguely nauseous, “present.”  
  
The static in Justin's voice is thicker, like it is more of a strain outside of those frozen moments. But he chimes in, “I'm here.”  
  
Like a joke, her own ghosts chime in their presence too.

***  
  
Eddie sits with Alex in the library, sometimes. They buy each other coffee back and forth, but neither invite each other out or up to their rooms. Alex is fine with this, and honestly, she thinks Eddie is, too. His smiles strike her as completely sincere. The most tell-tale sign of all, of course, is when he starts talking to her about other girls he wants to chat up. She expects the sting, but it is far, far less than she had anticipated, and she trusts the intent was never to make her jealous.  
  
Justin talks to her in a notepad. His spelling isn't great, and he is such a young ghost that his speech and slang are all very modern. It feels like she is just texting in the wrong app. It takes weeks for her to coax anything real from him, anything beyond sarcastic commentary on the amount of times she hits snooze and the things she chooses to take photos of. (Stray cats, mostly, and dark skies out her windows that never capture right, anyway.)

Justin pulls up August's facebook page for her, one day, and does impressively well at acting blasé about the words _in a relationship_.  
  
Alex thinks about Justin's plan a lot. Because she remembers thinking of ghosts when Michael died. She had imagined him behind her every moment of every day, for months. As if, dead, he would have nothing better to do than hover over her shoulder. She had never settled on whether the concept was comforting or not.  
  
Would he have been more at peace to watch her move on? Has she moved on?  
  
It doesn't matter. She would know if he were here, now, and he isn't.  
  
And then there is Jonas. Maybe – maybe they are the same as always. Maybe they are still most comfortable when there is a third person between them, a barrier to keep things appropriate. Maybe they were desperate to talk to each other, and ghost-hunting was a dam breaking.  
  
They talk on the phone nearly every night. Sometimes the calls are only long enough to say good night. Other times it is enough time to say trivial things, like, “Maya got a boyfriend, so she's never in our room which is _awesome,”_ or _“_ oh my God, Anders, in my math class? He raises his hand all the time and gets called on just to make these stupid unfunny jokes like his parents didn't give him enough attention as a kid.”  
  
Sometimes they talk for two or three hours. About their days, what they're learning in school. Jonas reads to her, some nights, mostly when he has tests coming up. Alex talks through her essay structures until she is too tired to go on, until her eyelids are heavy, and though she knows she needs to sleep to wake up on time tomorrow, she is desperate to keep talking anyway.  
  
They don't breach other subjects.  
  
Justin mostly leaves them alone. She can hear in the static when he is eavesdropping. He rarely interjects, so she doesn't mind. Sure, it feels somewhat intimate to be dozing off to Jonas' wide-awake, three-hours-earlier voice. And she knows that she is pushing it with this. But the content of what they say isn't anything dangerous.  
  
Before she knows it, it is March.

On the third of the month, she schedules her flights. New York to Los Angeles. Los Angeles to Portland. Most of the flights have short layovers. It feels silly to be paying fifty dollars more for a _long_ layover. Five hours. It sounds like a lot, but Alex knows it doesn't leave a lot of travel time. Not if she wants to be back in time to make her next flight.

Justin pulls up maps in her phone, routes to his home address from the airport.  
  
On March thirteenth she leaves New York. By the time she gets to Los Angeles she is dead-tired. Her head aches from the plane ride. Her legs feel wobbly, but she is ecstatic to stretch them as she waits in line for a cab. She checks the time anxiously until she is able to catch her own ride. She passes on the address.

Then puts her phone to her ear.

“Hey, Justin,” she says as if she had dialed a number. If nothing else, this is convenient for appearances. “We're almost there. What's your plan?”  
  
He hesitates. She can sense his nervousness in her fingertips.  
  
“Don't worry about it too much. You can see your family and decide from there if you want to stay or move on.” Justin isn't trapped in some nuclear rift. He could pass on any time. She is hesitant to let him be, if that's what he chooses, but at the same time, he is so much younger than hers are. Too young to frighten her.  
  
Alex thinks she could make it easier for him to leave, like opening the door. Common courtesy. But maybe getting what he wanted – seeing home – maybe that is the best help he can get. Being emotionally put to rest. No regrets.

Something like that.

“Okay,” He agrees, softly. “Thanks, Alex.”  
  
Alex checks the time on her phone. It took nearly forty minutes just to get a cab. She wonders what will happen if she misses her flight. “No prob, Bob.”

She keeps her phone to her ear the whole ride, though he doesn't have much else to say. She doesn't expect him to. He's always been more talkative in their notepad conversations than out loud.  
  
His parent's house is up in the hills. It's _huge_. They have to pass it twice before Alex is able to say for sure that they're there. She asks the driver to wait there, assuring him she'll only be a minute, and steps outside.  
  
The driveway is a spiral up to the two story house and its deck. She can see hints of a pool over the fence. It's all a bit much, compared to the small houses she's used to. Two-income families that still can't pay every bill every month, and then there's people like this. Single moms in real estate living in borderline mansions.  
  
Then again, so much space strikes Alex as a waste. She would never want such a big home. She isn't sure she even wants home. Not knowing is scary. Time is passing now, the future an inevitable, and she doesn't know, she doesn't _know_. Alex is not afraid of death, exactly. But she is afraid of the short stretch before it.  
  
“I wanted to see how he was doing. You think so much about how people might react if you died, but it gets so important when you're actually... Dead.”  
  
“You wanted to see that you were remembered,” Alex says, staring up at closed doors. She can hear the cab behind her, its engine still running as if it is impatient. “There's nothing wrong with that.”  
  
“I'm glad that August cried. It was hard to watch, but I'm glad. And I'm glad that he's doing better, now.”  
  
“Of course.”  
  
“I just want to see my family. My little sister. She's adopted, and... She's so little. I don't even know if she'll remember me at all when she grows up.”  
  
“I can't tell you that. But... You're dead, Justin. You can't change that by staying.”  
  
“I know. I know. I'll just... See everyone one last time. Say good-bye. You know.”  
  
Alex wishes she were not alone in God-knows-where-exactly in Los Angeles. Hours from a long flight to a long drive to be anywhere near anyone she knows. She wishes the voice she were talking to were not through her phone, were not a dead boy giving a final farewell to his little sister.  
  
“I'll just. See them,” he reiterates. Alex assumes he needs to psych himself up to it. She doesn't blame him. “Then I'll go. Reincarnate or something.”  
  
“Think you will?”  
  
“I don't know.”  
  
The cab driver honks, and when Alex glances over her shoulder he is staring at her through the rolled-down window. He looks more curious than anything. Probably because by all appearances she's had him drive her up to have a phone-call and stare at a house.  
  
Alex stammers, slightly flustered by the rush, “okay, well... I'll, uh. I don't know. Good luck?”  
  
Justin would nod, if he had a body to do it in. Her own ghosts' presence rises in her body like a baking cookie – raising up to say their own dispassionate good-bye.

“I won't be here for long. Thanks, Alex.”  
  
And that is the last he says to her.  
  
Her phone makes a piercing ring – the lights in the house flicker and she hears a distant, startled shriek before they come back on to the sound of laughter.  
  
Alex wonders what sort of ghost-hunter transports a ghost so they can haunt their family's home instead of an unoccupied dorm room.  
  
Alex thinks of the sunken, thinks _t_ _his one doesn't love anything_ but _the dead._  
  
Well, so what? Someone has to.  
  
She gets in the cab and goes back to the airport. The final price is expensive, and her driver is visibly baffled by the trip they've made. For all her nervousness about time, about missing her flight, she still winds up having to wait hours for boarding.  
  
And then she sleeps. Through the clouds, she sleeps.  
  
She dreams of watching Ren blow smoke-rings into a starry sky as they sit on the front porch. Michael is there, leaning over the banister. Jonas too, rolling his eyes and elbowing Ren. And the house is full of ghosts, which is strangely nonthreatening, these days. Seeing shadowed figures with glowing red eyes, staring out at them from the confines of what should be the image of safety is – nothing. It's nothing. Like toddlers behind a safety fence. The sound of fireworks in her dream wake her up from it.  
  
Her mother picks her up at the Portland airport, pulled up to the sidewalk. Alex scrambles inside the car with her backpack of clothes and nearly falls back asleep. She would have, if not for her mother's impressive rambling the whole way back. It wakes her up slowly but surely, over the hours it takes to get back to Camena.

Justin feels like he never existed for how quickly it was over. For how distant his journey was from hers. Adventures have that trouble. They're so far from home that they feel fake once they're over. There's nothing to ground you to them. Seeing her hometown scenery fly by feels strange. She can't remember if this is really home anymore.  
  
She has daydreamed so much of little things. Showing Jonas around campus, sharing her every day life with him the same way she wants to share it with Ren and even Nona. For a short while she'd had that desire here in Camena. The gnome-home tree on the walk home from her old elementary school, the cursed tire swings at the park playground. The garden Ren's grandma keeps meticulously, and the secret forts they'd built into the bushes, long-since abandoned.

Now she's shown him all these things. And now they are just – things. Places and things and a part of a suddenly very distant past.  
  
“Jonas is doing great in school. Well – I'm sure you know, we've heard him talking to you. His dad appreciates you helping him with his work so much, Honey. And it's so good to have someone at home with us. You know parents, always complaining about their kids, but we don't _actually_ ever want you to grow up. I'm so proud of you for going to college out of state, obviously, you know that, but it would have been nice for you to stay home for school, too.”  
  
Alex makes a face, laughing, because she is sure Ren's family is the exact opposite. His mom has been ecstatic to have a quieter house, even if she is down a baby-sitter for Ellie. She never dresses it up.  
  
“You father stopped by, over winter break, to see you,” her mother carries on after a short chuckle. “Didn't even warn me first. Clearly didn't check in with you, either. But he's – he's doing well. Says work is going great and he's been working on his personal projects. You know how he is.”  
  
Alex nods, but does not want to talk about this. Thankfully her mother is a mile-a-minute in topics and doesn't want to, either. She doesn't want to cry at the vague concept of how completely her family has fallen apart anymore, so that's an improvement.  
  
“Oh, and Ren! You didn't even tell _Ren_ that you wouldn't be home! You're lucky he'll be here for spring break, too, poor boy was a wreck without you. Cried for hours.”  
  
“Of course he did.”  
  
“Verbal crying.”  
  
“Did you try shoving food in his mouth? Usually shuts him up.”  
  
“You know, it was actually a way bigger struggle than usual to feed him! That's how you know the mourning is real.”  
  
Alex snorts. Her mom buys her fast food to hold her off until dinner, and Alex feels like a child, eating McDonald's with her feet curled at the edge of her seat. But she still does not feel like she is home.  
  
“Jonas seemed to cheer him up pretty well. I think his dad is still just ecstatic that he melded in with your buddies so well. I hope you know I appreciate letting him in like that. He's made a few of his own friends and wanders off from time to time, but I know he misses you both. Such a rough time to make new friends – just before everyone splits for college.”  
  
This is the part where Alex remembers why she keeps distance between herself and Jonas. Because this is her mother. Talking about him like a son. Talking about her every day life, married to his father.

Of course it's easy for Ren to say no judgment, for _Ren_ to say that they didn't grow up together, that they aren't really related. But how would their actual family take that?  
  
God, and imagine if they broke up! She is getting ahead of herself. She tries to derail the thought from even being on this track, but that would be _the_ worst family holidays _in the history of the world_ . The two step-siblings who used to date. ( _Ew,_ she thinks, because it even sounds gross to _her_ .)  
  
She shakes her head and as she steps inside her home, banishes these thoughts from her mind. This is a doorway to another sort of pocket. Normal household. Normal siblings. Normal Alex.

Her mother passes her and heads to the kitchen, still talking in the way she tends to do: voice not raising as she leaves the room, but aware enough not to expect anyone to keep listening. The last thing Alex really catches is “put your things in your room and veg out for a bit. I don't even know what we're doing for food tonight, but I'll figure something out.”  
  
Alex stands in the doorway and surveys the living room like it's her first time seeing it. She almost expects to see Jonas somewhere, or expects him to clamor down the stairs to greet her. The television is on a new entertainment center, but there is the same familiar dust-coating over the old books on the shelves.  
  
She puts her backpack in her room. The walls look bare without the posters she brought with her to the dorm. The stuffed animals she left behind are untouched. The bed is made, just how she left it. The room is freezing. Probably because her window was cracked open all winter. Oops.  
  
Her bed creaks beneath her as she sits down on its edge.  
  
She sits for a long time, just listening to the sounds of the house. Her mother seems to have settled on dinner plans: making Jonas' dad cook. She can hear the muffled sounds of conversation and dishes.  
  
When she ventures out, Jonas' dad greets her warmly. She loiters for a bit, listening to them resume their chat until a pause long enough for her to ask, “is Jonas home, even?” Because, honestly, if he isn't even home for her first day back in nearly half a year–  
  
–her mother answers, “I think he's up in his room?”  
  
Alex nods and heads to the steps. She climbs them quietly, unsure of exactly why she doesn't want the floorboards to creak and give her away. Maybe because she sort of wants to turn around.  
  
At the top of the stairs, the ninja-act strikes her as too successful to waste. She is already grinning when she throws open his door and exclaims, “Jonas, I'm home!”  
  
“ _Oh_ Jesus, Alex – what the fuck,” Jonas startles, going from a low slouch to sitting upright on his bed in no time and nearly dropping his PSP. It takes him a moment of staring at her to finally relax, even if he grumbles. He slides back down in invitation.  
  
After shutting the door behind her, Alex takes him up on it, climbing onto his bed to lay down beside him so she can see his screen. She watches him play his game in silence.  
  
“How'd it, uh. Go? With Justin.”  
  
“Dropped him off at his house, safe and sound. I'm like a pro ghost baby sitter.”  
  
Jonas laughs easily, not looking at her. His eyes are glued to the screen, but Alex knows he is not as invested in the game as he seems. It's avoidance. She doesn't blame him. She is too close, and knows better. (Apparently not, she thinks, because she only scoots closer until their arms are flush and one of her legs is crossed over on top of his.)  
  
“Yeah,” she continues, eventually. “I'm thinking of setting up a website or something. Expert ghost dispatch service. You pay transport fee and I'll talk your dead friends down from their existential nightmare.”  
  
“Or they'll face the oh-so-mature bullying of like a hundred meaner ghosts.”  
  
“They're not so bad,” Alex says.  
  
“You don't love anyone but the dead,” he jokes, but it comes out... Off.  
  
Alex shrugs. “What can you do? Sometimes, when a gal invites ninety-seven dead people to come live in her body until her eventual death, certain rumors about her preferences start to crop up.”  
  
Jonas winces, like the idea of it is still uncomfortable. She is tired of this. He says, “that's not really what they meant, I think.”  
  
“Can we not do this right now,” Alex says, only vaguely annoyed but knowing it will worsen if she doesn't nip it in the bud. “I just got home. Can't we just. Chill. Without you being all delicate about _my_ situation.”  
  
Okay, that's probably meaner than she needs to be. Jonas doesn't seem to take it that way, though, and he finally looks at her, sidelong, for just a moment. Then, as if he cannot stand it, back to his game. “Sure.”  
  
***  
  
“My sleep schedule is all kinds of messed up, man,” Alex blurts out, caught red-handed watching Netflix at four in the morning, cradling a bowl of cereal in her lap. Her hair is damp from a late-night bath, and she is only mildly self conscious of the water droplets on the shoulders of her pajama shirt. “Was it – is the tv too loud?”  
  
“Nah,” Jonas says, though he yawns. He plops down beside her on the couch. “Just couldn't sleep either, I guess.”  
  
They finish the movie out in silence, side by side. Silent agreement dictates that Jonas picks next movie while Alex returns her dishes to the kitchen. His choice is much quieter than Alex's had been. She's always assumed boys all liked action flicks and Star Wars, but Jonas has always been about the quiet introspective indies and unsolved mystery documentaries. They don't suit him, even a little.  
  
Alex is tired, but knows from the last dozen times she felt this way that once she stands to head to her room, she will be wide awake. She has already played the 'how long can I stare at my bedroom ceiling before I die of boredom' game three times tonight.  
  
Alex curls herself over the arm rest.  
  
“Hey.” Jonas' voice is quiet, and he still will not look directly at her for long. She draws herself back up, awaiting the inevitable _go to bed_. Instead he says, “come here.”

She does. Instead of leaning over the arm rest she leans into Jonas' shoulder, letting him put an arm around her. He presses a kiss into her hair, and she just _sighs_ and lets him.  
  
“Missed you,” he says.  
  
“Missed you too, dummy.”  
  
It's only a few hours before she is being woken by quiet footsteps and bright sunlight through the blinds. She is laying sideways on the couch, and feels Jonas holding her. He is still snoring, warm breath between her shoulder-blades and hair tickling her nape. His arm is over her waist, and his knees bent flush behind hers.  
  
“Just on my way to work, Hun,” her mother murmurs, passing by in front of them to grab her purse from the coffee table. She is already dressed in her scrubs for work. “It's only six, you can go back to sleep.”

Half asleep, Alex nods, and wonders what her mother thinks of this. Can she see this as siblings? Alex would never lay with Michael like this. Nap on his shoulder, rest her head on his lap, maybe. Jonas' fingers are slipped just under the hem of her shirt.  
  
Or can she see it like Ren does?  
  
She is too tired to think. She lets herself drift back to sleep.  
  
The next time she wakes up it is because Jonas moves. Rather violently, he jerks back from her – as much as he can with the back of the couch behind him. She rolls over to face him sleepily, though it takes a great deal of effort with how little space they have.  
  
She buries her face in his chest. _Just for a minute_ , she tells herself. _Just for a second._  
  
She feels the tension in his body, in the way he keeps himself propped up for a moment longer. Then he relaxes again, slow and cautious, before nuzzling his face into the crook of her neck. It reminds her of a puppy, desperate for attention, or making its bed. His voice is low with sleep, and too close to her ear. “Dad's not home.”  
  
“Ew! Jonas,” Alex snaps, pushing him away so hard that she nearly sends herself tumbling off the couch. She recovers, standing to back away from the couch, fixing all the ridden-up ankles and hems of her pajamas.  
  
Jonas looks tired, still, and confused for a moment as he stares at her, before his eyes go wide. “Wha–I didn't mean anything like – like _that_ , I was just _saying_ I heard him leave for work earlier, Jesus, Alex!”  
  
“ _Well,_ ” she retorts, feeling her face flush. Maybe enough to match his. It's probably a toss-up. “You were, like...! Being all snuggly! Why even say that, then?”  
  
Jonas sits up, all that tension back again in his squared shoulders. “I don't know! So you wouldn't get nervous, or something! You started it.”  
  
Alex pretends this is not true with ease, turning away from him and his stupid bed-head. “Gross, man.”  
  
He laughs, which would be a comfort if it didn't sound vaguely hysterical. “You're ridiculous! Every time I get _so sure_ I'm not just imagining it, you treat me like I'm crazy again!”  
  
This gives her pause, finger-combing her tangled mess of hair. She looks back over her shoulder. The look on his face is so weary, not with sleep, but with _this,_ with _them_ , that she finally caves in. The sigh that passes her lips weighs a thousand pounds, and its loss leaves her body uncomfortably empty. Nervousness volunteers to fill the space without her permission.  
  
“You're not crazy, Jonas. We're just stupid, and you're stupider than me if you think this'll all be okay.”

“This is the best breakfast conversation I've ever had,” Jonas says, flatly. “The _we're in love but probably people will think that's creepy, so we'll just_ _ignore it_ _. Want toast or a muffin? t_ alk. _”_  
  
“Augh,” Alex's fingers bury in her hair in frustration. He said it – he said _love_. It sounds juvenile. They've never said it out loud. If she is honest, there have been a hundred times that she convinced herself _she_ was the one who was reading things wrong. But now it's out there. Now he's said it. “Who cares what people think, Jonas?”  
  
“You, mostly?”  
  
“I – I don't care! What can it hurt me? The whole town already thinks I'm a _liter_ _al_ murderer! But how long do you think high school relationships last? How's your dad gonna take it? Can't you just,” she stammers, hearing herself getting more and more frenzied. The lights flicker in the living room; in the kitchen a light bulb shatters. “Can't you just get a regular girlfriend? Or something?!”  
  
“First of all, we're not in high school anymore, if you've somehow missed that during your stay in _New York,_ for _college_ _._ Second of all, I've _done_ that,” Jonas says, annoyed.  
  
The lights in the living room shut off, like they mean to punctuate his sentence – Alex switches them back on as fast as she can manage as if to deny it had happened at all, as if there isn't already glass on the kitchen floor from another slip up. It hurts. But it's what she wanted for him, and the contrast of relief and frustration forces an insincere laugh to bubble out of her.

“You have a girlfriend,” Alex verifies, careful to keep emotion from her voice.  
  
He sniffs, taking a moment before answering, “no. Not anymore.”  
  
“Ah,” Alex says, feeling distant.  
  
“I didn't mean – not 'not anymore' in a creepy way, we didn't break up because I can't get over you,” he elaborates, sounding defensive. “But, I don't know, I just got sketched out. By relationships. ”  
  
“Then what's your plan, here?” Alex demands, hand on her chest. “Like, you're just suddenly gonna go from _Mr._ _Generic_ _C_ _ommitment_ _I_ _ssues_ to _liter_ _al_ _etern_ _al_ _devoted boyfriend_ , because listen, otherwise the family reunions are gonna be a real bitch to attend!”  
  
“They're going to be a bitch no matter what, when all our options on the table are to be like _this_ forever or to not work out because you're have a severe case of pessimism.”  
  
“Don't forget the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, Jonas,” Alex says, sarcasm creeping into her voice. She wants to be dignified, really she does. “ T here's always the outcome where we work out and have to face our parents as brother and sister and _also a couple_ , and I'm sure _that_ will go amazing! You're right! Let's choose that one!”  
  
“Glad you agree,” Jonas drawls. She knows he is just joking. The both of them have this problem, she is beginning to realize. They only know how to argue by making fun of themselves, of each other, of the situation. It isn't getting them anywhere.  
  
She needs a breather. She runs her fingers through her hair once more , much easier now that she has aggressively pulled through all the knots. The ghosts are like a flame in her gut, repeating a mantra of _love, love, love_ , as if this is something they could take from the moment if she would just let them.  
  
Her face still feels hot, but the air is beginning to cool.  
  
Jonas seems to ca l m with it, and the next time he speaks, it is with greater sincerity. “Look. I'm not trying to like... Force you into... Whatever. Anything. A relationship, I guess. Obviously starting anything would be completely stupid if you weren't comfortable with it. I just want it _out there_ that usually, when two people are totally crazy about each other and mutually _know this_ , they don't spend two years trying to pretend it isn't true.”  
  
“And most people that happens to aren't step siblings,” Alex retorts, able to keep her own tone level to match his. She adds, defensively, “ w ho says I'm crazy about you? Also, like, a year and a half. Don't exaggerate.”  
  
“Eternity,” he says, like a correction.  
  
Alex rolls her eyes. “Cheesy. And I don't think you have the right to say that. I do.”  
  
“ Bu t you won't .”  
  
Alex focuses on turning the lights back on. The ones she can, anyway. Jonas doesn't mention it, but stands up. She pretends not to notice him going into the kitchen and carefully cleaning up her mess. She pretends not to feel guilty as he sweeps up the broken glass and replaces the bulb. Alex watches him climb down from the dining room chair and slide it back into place. She watches him brush past her and begin to head up to his bedroom.  
  
She blurts out, awkwardly, “ I just think you should keep trying to see other girls. Like, not your step sister.”  
  
He is only partway up the steps, and looks down at her over the railing. “I'm not gonna say some bullshit like that I'd never get past this,” he says, sounding resigned. “So, like, yeah. Eventually that's going to happen. What about you? That what you're gonna do?”  
  
Alex shifts her weight beneath his gaze and has to avert her own eyes. “I mean. Yeah, eventually. I'm just not... Into dating. Right now.”  
  
“Same,” Jonas says, and Alex has to fight, has to claw back control, so that the lights stay on.  
  
“It's not the same! You – you were always the one who – made the moves! You were the one who – who wanted to date Nona!”  
  
Jonas just arches an eyebrow, saying nothing.

Alex has not gone into that much detail about the island loops. Some basics. She has mentioned some details. But they have talked about it so rarely that she still isn't entirely sure what the loop they remember looks like compared the hundreds she recalls.  
  
She feels stupid for being distraught over some potenti al that never even existed in this reality. “On the island,” she clarifies. “Sometimes, you... Wound up with Nona. You know? Easy as that. Before the night was even done.”  
  
Jonas is resting heavier and heavier over the railing, bent over like he's talking to her over a balcony ledge. (Regular Romeo and Juliet, they are. Alex wants to puke at the thought.) “She's cute,” he says, blithely.  
  
Alex feels the heat creep back up her neck, feels her cheeks flushing. And Jonas, that asshole, just looks amused, if not bitter.  
  
“ I get that there's a lot of shit you brought back with you,” Jonas says, motioning vaguely in the air. “But you really need to let go of some stuff. So here's the deal, I guess. I can be your brother, if that's what you want. That means my life stops revolving around you.”  
  
“It shouldn't anyway!”  
  
“It shouldn't,” Jonas agrees, glancing up the stairs like he is eager to get moving. “It means you can't lay all over me in bed anymore, like yesterday? No more going on what are basically dates . No more talking on the phone _every single night_ , Alex. What was I supposed to think? How was any of that supposed to be signaling that I don't have a chance? ”  
  
She shifts her weight. “I was close with Michael, too.”  
  
“Not like this, I hope.”  
  
“No, ew. God, no.” She isn't sure how to articulate what she meant. She isn't sure what she meant. She knows Jonas is right.  
  
“So that's the first option. I can be your brother. Or there's option two. I can be your boyfriend.” She flinches at the word, and he pretends not to notice. “And we can just keep on going how we're going, and keep on doing what we're doing. Only with less shitty conversations like this and less phone calls that go dead because you don't want to say or hear something you can't de al with. And we can keep it a secret forever, or just for now. Or we can talk right away . Whatever you want. ”  
  
Alex wishes some future-her would come on the tv and tell her what to do. She wishes her own image could say, disjointed and experienced, _stick with Jonas._ Just so she could have some sembl a nce of trust t h at it would not be a complete train-wreck.  
  
She can see the branching paths of answers, but not far enough. She could say yes, and lay down with him in bed. They would kiss, nothing more, but stay there all day, enjoying long, comfortable pauses between whispered conversations. She could say no, and watch him go upstairs alone.

She needs long-term results, not the short term. This isn't helpful.

“Can I choose later?” Alex asks, helplessly alone with the responsibility.  
  
Jonas straightens up and tells her flatly, “sure, Alex,” as he walks up the stairs. Same as if she had said no.  
  
***  
  
She feels dizzy. The ghosts are raging inside her like a storm, desperate for love and getting amped up and up on the emotions that she's pushing down.

Her bedroom doesn't feel like home anymore. Not with barren walls and an empty desk, but it isn't a lack of posters and notebooks that makes it feel stranger. She wants to go to New York. Or Los Angeles. Seattle. Anywhere, really. Somewhere new. (Fewer planes, though. She'd like fewer planes.)  
  
She doesn't know how to face Jonas after their talk.  
  
Thankfully, Ren comes to her rescue. This time he thinks to text her in advance, already burned once by her unannounced absence. Then he comes to pick her up on foot . They walk all the way to his house, but the weather is nice enough that it doesn't feel like as long of a trip as it is.  
  
She catches him up on Eddie, and Justin, and Jonas. It strikes her as ridiculous that between a new flirt in college, a liter al ghost that she carried across state, and her fucked up non-romance with her step-brother, the latter is what takes up the most conversation.  
  
“Have you considered that your parents, like... Already know?”  
  
Alex stumbles, which makes Ren stumble, because he is balancing at the edge of the sidewalk with a hand on her shoulder to keep steady. “What?”  
  
“Maybe not, maybe it's easier for them to see it through that parent al blindness, but. Look, you two are stupid in love.” Alex still winces at the word. “It's just hard to imagine anyone looking at you and _not_ picking up on it.” Alex opens her mouth to protest, and Ren adds, “you were literally spooning on the couch this morning, I believe you mentioned that ?”

“When I fell asleep, my head was on his shoulder,” Alex says, defensive.  
  
“Sure, sure. And when Nona falls asleep her hands are outside of my shirt. ”  
  
“What?”  
  
“Nothing,” Ren whistles. He lets Alex elbow him, snickering, until he gives up on his balancing act, laughing. “I'm just saying... I mean, you could even try telling them and then rewinding! I don't think Jonas would blame you for _that_ abuse of power.”  
  
Alex groans. “Okay, okay. Enough of the Alex-hour. How are things in Renville? Sounds like going good with Nona?”  
  
Ren's face lights up. “Planning a trip out to visit her over Summer break! She wants to invite Clarissa for the last week or so, but I'm like, man, this is our romantic getaway! But I guess for her she's been gotten-away. For a long time. And it's like, a visit to where she's still going to be for a long time. So we'll probably have Clarissa over.” He does not sound even remotely disappointed. “Oh! And I started playing with this band back in Cali. They've been changing the name like every week, but it's fun! It's fun.”  
  
“So what's the, like, plan?” Alex asks, venturing the words cautiously as if she could take them back if she changes her mind, but only if she goes slow enough. “After college.”  
  
Ren flexes his fingers in discomfort. “I don't know. Does anyone know? I'd _like_ it if the band were super successful, but I don't really see that happening. It'll just be a hobby, but we'll probably sell CDs online. Maybe play loc al every now and then. ”  
  
“That's not what I mean.”  
  
“Yeah, I know. Just... It would be cool if I could get a job in sound editing. Stay in the music industry. Put those nerd skills to use. Not have to pay for my own sound editing.”  
  
“Wow.”  
  
“ What about you?”  
  
Alex's brain does the equivalent of Justin's piercing phone-screeches. “Uh,” she manages. “I. Don't know? Study engineering I guess. Michael was kind of okay with just getting some regular shitty job, as long as he was with Clarissa, so... So I don't really...”

Ren lets her flounder for a moment longer, then laughs. “I'm not asking about Michael.”  
  
“Well, yeah, but I'm really just following blueprints, here,” Alex says realizing as the words come out that they aren't right. “I guess I agree that any crap job will do if it's not all I've got going on, but–“  
  
“–Alex,” Ren says, firmly. “I'm not asking what Michael wanted to do with his future or what you think about what he wanted to do. Are you, like, okay?”  
  
“I don't know either! You can't get uppity about that when you didn't know.”  
  
“That's not my point. I just think... You're probably going to have a lot harder of a time figuring out what you want to do if you're not even asking yourself what _you_ want to do.”  
  
If she is honest, Alex figures she does not really deserve the luxury of living anyone else's dreams but Michael's. If she is going to take his future from him, the least she could do is pursue his dreams. Whatever they were. She curses his easy-going nature, and doesn't want to admit to any of this. Instead she jokes, “I literally just want to go hunt down ghosts. I want to travel around and help them, like I was able to with Justin.”  
  
Ren shrugs. “Then get a job with a flexible schedule, get a second cell number, and start up a freelance ghost hunting website.”  
  
Alex bursts out laughing, until she realizes that Ren is beginning to look offended by it. “Seriously?”  
  
“Seriously! Just – look, best of both worlds. Get a crappy job like Michael was willing to _settle_ for. Take time off when people call you up to cry ghost. Move in with your Clarissa.”  
  
Alex considers what she has seen from the few sleepovers she has had with Clarissa back in New York. “I'll die if I try to live with Clarissa.”  
  
“ _Your_ Clarissa, not Michael's Clarissa. I feel like you have a fixation,” Ren says, this time joking with her.  
  
“That's stupid,” Alex says, gears lining up in her mind against her will.  
  
“ By the way,” Ren says, “I want no part in your ghost adventures. Like, you can tell me about them? But if you come see me, like, _Ren I found seven hundred more parasites to live in my body and also here is a haunted porcelain doll,_ I'm going to just cut ties right then and there.”  
  
Alex sometimes wants to mess with him, when he talks like this. She wants her eyes to glow red and to isolate him from the wold for – just for a second. Just to see his face. She's worried about what it would mean about her if she weren't able to overcome the impulse. She's worried it wouldn't just be a joke, sometimes. Just a little.  
  
“Still got a long time to figure it out,” Alex murmurs.  
  
“College'll fly by! Just like high school.”  
  
“Mostly because I'm sleep deprived and can't tell if I'm awake or asleep despite the _mass_ amounts of starbucks I'm consuming, and by the end of the week I can't remember a thing. But. Yeah. Woosh, just like that.”  
  
“Yeah!”  
  
When they reach Ren's house they just sit on the porch. The weather is a strange out-of-season warm , and Ellie brings them otter-pops from the freezer. Ren sticks his tongue out to show her how it's dyed blue, and they talk about how long her roots have gotten since she last got her hair done . They talk about her jacket, and her necklace, and her shirt, and her major.  
  
Ren leans back, which looks terribly uncomfortable as the edge of the step behind him digs into his spine. “I might've been a little too harsh about it? I don't know. I still think it's a problem. Especially with how nervous you got on the way here. But... You know Michael hated that pedest al shit, right? You know more than _anyone_ how much he hated it.”  
  
Alex keeps her mouth full of popsicle as an excuse not to answer.  
  
“No one can compete with a dead guy.”  
  
“No one needs to, Ren.”  
  
Ren just shrugs. “You need to. I think. And Jonas is.” She makes a face so severe that he quickly corrects, “not in a weirdo way! I just mean – I think you're preoccupied, still? And it's hurting things. A lot of things.”  
  
“How come you didn't invite him over with us?” Alex asks, realizing for the first time that it has been a complete non-subject when a year ago it would have never happened.  
  
“You're my bestie,” Ren says, and shrugs again. “And Jonas texted me this morning an _ugh_ that had like a million Gs and Hs, so I figured something had happened even before you gave me the hot gos s ' .”  
  
Alex enjoys the cold freshness of winter air as the sun goes down. It has been a flawless day, but h er true favorite is the Summer, when the sun sets _late,_ and the warm breeze lasts until midnight. It is sad to think she won't get to share that with Ren, this year.  
  
“Do you guys... I mean, does he. Talk? About us?”  
  
“Sometimes. Only when he's really stressed out, and those are more like rants on everything bothering him that he can think of.”  
  
“What does Nona think?” Alex asks, because she knows that Ren is a filthy rat that would tell Nona anything. Whether she wanted to hear it or not, frankly.  
  
Ren hesitates. “She thought it was weird, at first. Then she thought it was cute. I think she ended up coming around by thinking, like, what if you two had met before your parents? Like, somehow a scenario where a couple's parents meet and marry is more wholesome than when a couple marries and their kids pair off. But they're the same thing, when you think about it, so. She's cool. ”  
  
“ I'm not really looking forward to hanging out with friends who are grossed out. Even if they can't help it.”  
  
“She's not,” Ren rushes to defend, though he can't back it up very well . “Besides...”  
  
The silence stretches. Alex listens to the birds in the trees and Ren's mother playing with Ellie, just inside. She can hear a children's show sing-along.  
  
Alex asks, slowly, “ w e're not, uh... We might not hang out that much, when we're grown-ups, huh?”  
  
“We're already grown-ups,” Ren says, and his smile is a bit weak. “And I haven't seen you in half a year. You or Nona. So... I don't know. I don't know. Nona wants to join a ballet troupe, and all her connections are in the UK, and I don't know how long I can keep going on texts and photos and phone calls and emails. I don't know what _I'm_ doing, which means I don't know _where_ I'll be doing it. I'm pretty sure Clarissa doesn't plan on coming back, like, ever. And you want to – you don't know either, which is fine, totally, but means who knows where you'll be either ? It's hard enough to balance work schedules around each other after we scattered to the winds , but when you want to run around hu nting ghosts ? That's a whole other level of _when the fuck can we hang out?_ ”  
  
Alex lets his words settle . Let's them find their place in the air. She sucks at the last bit of ice in her mouth , sucking the flavor out before chewing it up . She watches the fluffy pink clouds and thinks they really do not suit this conversation. “Been holding onto that for a while, huh?”  
  
Ren laughs, caught, and Alex joins in.

“It'll work out,” she tells him. “You and Nona. Work. Us. Maybe we won't see each other as much, but. It'll work out.”  
  
“ On one hand I'm like, well, we got through a ghost haunting. You got through a worse ghost haunting, and got through it even harder. So there's no way the rest of the world is so... Bleak. You know? Of course we'll make it. We made it through some buuuullshit.”  
  
Alex nods along.  
  
Then Ren adds, “on the other hand, like, maybe we're just cursed?”

She elbows him, laughing at what she knows was a joke. Sometimes Ren's panic and his jokes are the same thing. Sometimes they just sound the same.

“Forever,” Ren says, making a gesture in the air that she assumes means eternity. “The ghosts are going to make us all miserable. As is also the general way of adulthood.”  
  
“They always skip that part in social studies.”  
  
“The part where it doesn't take ghosts to destroy your future and your happiness, just the harsh realities of living? Yeah. It's too much of an existential bummer for middle schoolers.”  
  
They stay outside until they can't handle it anymore, until they are shivering beneath the stars and the porch lights. Ren insists, “it's too cold for you to be walking home,” and taps away at his phone. Alex figures he is asking her mother to come pick her up. (The joys of childhood friendship in a small town: your best friend and your mom text each other, sometimes.)  
  
Jonas is the one who shows up, twenty minutes later, driving his dad's car.  
  
Alex sort of wants to punch Ren, but she settles for hugging him goodbye so tightly that he coughs and wheezes in pain.  
  
***  
  
“Let's not go home, yet,” Alex says, her first words to Jonas after nearly five minutes of driving.  
  
He glances over at her. “Yeah?”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
There isn't that much to do in a town like this, especially not late at night. Alex didn't have anything in mind, and neither does Jonas; he turns off onto the highway. The roads are near empty, save for them.

They just drive. Jonas drives like they're going out of town, maybe to one of the dozens of casinos nearby. He drives straight along the coastline. Alex watches the bright reflections on the ocean waves, and cracks her window down to hear them crashing, and to feel the breeze through her hair and on her cheeks, even if it makes her shiver.  
  
She reaches over and turns on the radio. They fight over stations in between songs, silently jabbing at the stereo buttons and laughing the more they go back and forth.

There aren't any streetlights out here, but she watches the moonlight on Jonas' face and doesn't bother to look away when he catches her. This is what she wants for her future. She doesn't know exactly how she's going to get it, but this is _it_ for her. Long talks with Ren and m idnight rides with Jonas. It doesn't matter where.  
  
Eventually they stop at lookout spot, a small pull-off from the road. Back the direction they came, she can see a lighthouse in the distance. There are lighthouses all along the coast, but this is the only one that can be seen from the road for a long ways .  
  
They sit in the car, quiet between the two of them , just watching he water, until finally Jonas asks, “wanna get out?”  
  
Alex nods.  
  
Outside is colder than she expected. This close to the water is always windy; it's enough to whip her hair in her eyes. She has to hold it back with one hand, and paces aimlessly in all the empty, unmarked parking spaces. Jonas stands beside the car, stretching. He leaves the door open for the music, and w hen their eyes meet, Alex offers a grin.  
  
Thick stone railing surrounds the parking area, and below that, a steep drop down to the rocky beach. There aren't many places with beach access out of town. Alex sits on the wall , legs swung over the edge. She is eye-level with treetops, feet dangling high above the rocky beach. Michael used to hate when she would sit in places like this, always worried she'd fall and hurt herself.  
  
Jonas comes to sit beside her and pulls out a pack of cigarettes. He offers her one, then shrugs when she shakes her head and lights his own.

She kicks her heels against the wall.

Eventually Jonas asks, motioning with the glow of his cigarette towards the lighthouse, “think you could fuck with that? Like, don't, obviously.”  
  
“Wouldn't hurt anyone if I did. They each have a unique timing and pattern, but... Lighthouse jobs are mostly done with GPS now. Me and Michael took the tour. It's just lit up for tradition.”  
  
“So?”  
  
Alex considers. “It's far away, so I could, but I'd probably pass out and get some horror-movie nosebleed going on.”  
  
“Uh... Don't do that, then.”  
  
She watches him smoke, vaguely enamored. She likes the idea of something so warm filling your lungs. Likes the idea of breathing in something other than air. She doesn't so much like the idea that it's slowly killing him, or that she would just cough like an idiot if she tried to smoke.  
  
But, hey. Everyone is dying.  
  
“What's your plans?” She asks. “Like, after college.”

Jonas takes a particularly slow drag. “I don't know. It's lucky your mom doesn't hate me, so I can always bum around and figure it out, but... That's not ideal. Kind of hoping I figure it out before I graduate, though.”  
  
“ How about this?”  
  
Jonas looks at her, trying to decipher what she means. She isn't really sure, herself. Going on adventures, she supposes. He is sitting so close to her that their arms are touching, and she does not pull away.  
  
Jonas shrugs. “Yeah. This would be good.” He grins at her. “Midnight ghost hunting.”  
  
“ O ne of these lighthouses is supposed to be haunted. Cape Meares, I think? Or maybe it was Yaquina .”  
  
“I think lighthouses all have ghost stories about them, just by virtue of being around long enough. Should test it sometime. See if it's just rumors.”

“Think they'd be mad if I exorcised their ghost? If the selling point was _ghosts_ , they might have a hard time with the tourism. Like, _we_ used _to have a ghost,_ _until some bimbo out of nowhere took it from us_ _...!_ You know?”  
  
Jonas ponders this with a long hum. “Good publicity for a ghost hunter, though.”  
  
Alex wonders how long this joke of that being a viable future will be drawn out. She's beginning to wonder if Jonas and Ren are even really joking about it. Or if she is. She has been wondering, lately, if those small houses on the edge of town with drift-wood signs that say _psychic_ are really any more ridiculous than her own nonsense.

“It'll work out,” Jonas says, as if under the impression that Alex needs comforting right now. He puts his arm around her, pulling her into his side and squeezing. She leans into it, glad for the body heat. And that he still touches her so easily after their stupid fight that had culminated in him saying not to do it anymore.  
  
God, it's impossible to imagine life without this.  
  
She doesn't know how long they stay this way. She watches countless rotations of the lighthouse and only thinks of time in the context of songs on the radio. Each time they end she thinks, okay, that must have been about four minutes. But she does n o t keep track of how many play.  
  
When they finally climb back into the car, cranking up the heater and rubbing at their arms, it is t hree in the morning.  
  
Jonas drives them home. Alex wants to follow him up to his room and lay down with him again, like before. One leg over his, her head resting at his shoulder. She can see those paths. She can see that it's an option. That nothing would happen beyond sleep.  
  
She still chooses to sleep in her own room.

***

Her mother talks to her, in the morning. Wakes her up and comes to sit at the edge of her bed, wringing her hands nervously in the six am sunlight.  
  
It's excruciating.  
  
Compassionate, and something Alex is grateful for, lucky for, she knows.  
  
But still torturous.  
  
Her mother apologizes for waking her up to have such a tense conversation so early in the morning. (She is worried she might miss her if she waits until after work, worried she might put this off too long, if she doesn't talk to her today.)

Alex, still tired from only having gone to bed two hours ago, just mumbles that it's alright, and tries to blink her vision clear.  
  
She asks if she and Jonas are seeing each other. Alex stammers a terribly transparent _no_.  
  
She asks if they have slept together, stuttering over the words and looking down at her fingers. Alex is more earnest this time, more believable when she insists, _Mom! No. Seriously._  
  
She says that she knows they aren't really related. Knows that it's a bit late in Alex's life to really see anyone _new_ as family. She knows that Jonas is a wonderful boy, and she knows they have been there for each other. She would never want to take that from them.  
  
Alex tries to reiterate that they aren't seeing each other, and her mom smiles and nods and says, sincerely, that she knows.  
  
She hugs Alex, and even though they are nearly the same size, same body-type, her presence is big. Comfortingly overwhelming. She says she isn't sure Jonas' dad will take it well, but she wanted to let her daughter know that she is there for her. That she knows she hasn't always been. That she knows it's hard to know what to do, at this age, and that she wants to minimize that as best she can.

That it may be hard in town if it isn't a secret. That she doesn't want Alex to have nowhere safe, nowhere she can relax without secrecy. You should always feel safe enough to at least retreat and be yourself at home.  
  
It's all very heartwarming, and if Alex is honest, she should have seen it coming. Being caught sleeping on the couch together was probably a big tip. The late-night phone calls. Spending more time in each others rooms together than apart.  
  
Then her mom messes it all up by telling her that they could always elope to somewhere no one knows them, and then, as if to soothe Alex's horrified shrieking, dropping a handful of condoms onto her bedside table.  
  
***  
  
Jonas' dad doesn't see it the same way. Not at first.

Alex is grateful to be leaving in under a week.  
  
Jonas' dad doesn't have the words for his disapproval. Mostly he just glares across the dinner table and looks at them suspiciously, pretending not to notice that Alex's mother is glaring back at him every time he does. (It is nice to know her mother has her back, Alex thinks, but also uncomfortably familiar to watch her parental figures have a silent fight over dinner.)  
  
Every so often he breaks into short, mini-rants about how unacceptable it would be. How lucky they are to be _family._ And, in a vaguely threatening way, how lucky they are to have not done anything, as if they are hormonal idiots he had to peel off of each other himself.  
  
Alex doesn't feel like crying so much as she is just annoyed. She's leaving soon anyway, and consequences are hard to consider. He isn't even _her_ dad, she thinks, openly rolling her eyes. There is a part of it that is her ghosts, protective of their second-hand love, protective of what they are only just getting to finally taste.  
  
It's a sign of self improvement that she doesn't tear open a rift, here. That she doesn't conjure up the images of him dead on the ground. She is able to push back the impulse entirely.  
  
She lashes out in a different way. The next time Jonas' father makes a comment about it, she turns to Jonas and snaps, “ _s_ _ee?_ This is what it would be like. _This_ is why I shut you down.”  
  
He offers her a fake sort of half-smile, somewhere between guilt and resentment. He has taken all of his father's ranting like this – quietly and painfully.  
  
Ironically, her snapping is probably what resolves it. Alex doesn't know if it's the realization that they both know better and have thought about it more deeply than he'd realized, or if it's learning that _Jonas_ was the pursuer that sways his father, but whatever it is, he changes his mind.  
  
Maybe it's unrelated. Maybe it's the fervent conversations with her mother that she can half-hear through the walls.  
  
She doesn't have to have the same horrifically awkward talk with Jonas' dad as with her own mother. He stops by her bedroom late, late in the evening, and sighs before saying he loves her, and more earnestly, that he loves Jonas, and wants them to do whatever makes them both happy. They are adults after all, he says, with a suspicious glance at her pile of condoms.  
  
She tells him earnestly that she appreciates it. Then, with increasing sincerity and desperation, that _they aren't even seeing each other_. Then, guiltily _,_ _yet_.  
  
Then, _and_ _mom gave me those! They're not – I wasn't the one that – I – we – didn't! God!_ _Please leave!_ _I'm sorry and I appreciate you and I love you too, but get_ out! _  
  
_ This seems to comfort him, somewhat. The way he laughs and allows himself to be shooed away makes her think he believes her.  
  
His heavy sigh when he thinks she is not watching any longer is depressing, but even so.

Even so.

***  
  
Alex hides out in her room to avoid their parents until she is sure they're both at work.  
  
It's nice to be able to sleep until noon. She is going to miss seasonal vacations, after school. She likes getting to recharge. When it comes time for a career, she knows this will end, and she will have to be 'on' permanently. Sometimes she isn't sure how to handle that.  
  
Most days she is fine. Some days it's as hard to get out of bed as it was the day after Michael died, and she has to tell herself, “some days you'll have to, because that's being an adult.” Adults don't have a choice in the matter. They have to wake up to work to pay bills to live. No matter how tired they are. No matter how much they need a spring break.  
  
Jonas knocks on her door, presumably to let her know the coast is clear. When she steps out, he is waiting for her in the hall, looking anxious. She looks him over.

“I take it your dad talked to you, too,” she says.  
  
Jonas furrows his brow, clearly doing his best to look at ease and failing. He shudders theatrically. “It was... So uncomfortable.”  
  
“Yep,” Alex says.  
  
“Yep,” Jonas agrees. After a moment of awkward silence, Jonas takes a seat on the bay-view window cushions. “So that's, uh... One less thing. I guess.”

“It's still...” Alex trails off. No more skirting around this. No more being vague for plausible deniability. Their conversations all seem distant and pointless. It's almost funny to think that she's denied it every step of the way, denied it just days ago. But this is still where they wind up. “Weird. It's not like this just makes everything okay, you know?”  
  
“No, I know.” Jonas is very pointedly interested in looking out the window instead of at her. “It. Kind of feels even weirder. And I know dad's not even really alright with it, he's just. Trying to be. Which feels gross.”  
  
“Yep,” Alex says again. She thinks of how badly she had wanted to lay in bed together, but just as quickly thinks of the fucking pile of _condoms_ on her bedside table. She blurts out, “do you want to see a movie? Or something? Want to get out of the house?”  
  
He sighs with relief, “God, yes, please.”  
  
They watch a horror movie, because it seems appropriate, and everything else playing looks awful. Or like something Ren might want to see, and Alex would hate to watch it without him. She will only be home for so long – she needs to visit him again.  
  
They share popcorn and soda, nudging each other over it back and forth. They whisper snide comments about the characters, and only scream in jest – though Jonas' shoulders jump a number of times. It doesn't feel like a date. It isn't any more romantic than the rest of their outings they've had.

But Alex does stare long and hard at Jonas' hand on the arm-rest. She tries not to get caught, but about halfway through the film she hears him laughing under his breath before he flips the arm-rest up. He rests his hand on her leg, palm up for her to hold.  
  
She does. It doesn't feel so gross. She lets her head drop to rest on his shoulder, momentarily. Until she remembers that they are sort of in public, that there is a chance that someone who knows them might see. She sits up straight, but does not unlace their fingers.  
  
It's still early when the film lets out. It had been sunny in the morning, but now it is grey and muggy.

They drive, for lack of much else to do out of the house. (Something Alex has loved about New York. There is more to do. More than a stray strip-mall by the one theater.) The road is just like last time, along the coastline, though a little less frightening now that there is more light than just the moon and their headlights.

Alex watches the water come in and out of view as they pass through the hills. It isn't terribly cold, but foggy, and the ocean-waves are minty green.

“Driving off into the sunset is a bad habit to be in at three pm,” Alex says.  
  
“Works in the winter.”  
  
“It's spring.” Alex pulls her knees up to her chest, her heels digging into the edge of her seat. “Summer would be the best time for the beach, anyway.”  
  
“You gonna come back for summer break?”  
  
“Yeah. Probably. Yeah. I don't like being far from the ocean.” Her only hesitation is that it's not a lie to say she is bored of their tiny town. That ache for travel and adventure is only getting bigger the more she tastes other cities and their crowds. Places with more reliable weather than Oregon, places warmer in the summers and colder in the winters. Places with things to do, places with strangers. Places with ghosts besides her own.  
  
There is a pause before Jonas asks, “just probably, huh?”

She knows that what he would rather ask is why the sea takes priority over him. The answer to that is simple. “Yeah. If I don't come back, you can come out to visit me.”  
  
“Even better. Who would pass up the chance to spend a vacation with Clarissa?”  
  
She would elbow him if he weren't driving. “Clarissa's great.” At his skeptical look she laughs, and insists, “she is! We get along way better, now!”  
  
They pull off at the lookout again, and in the day time it is nearly full with other cars. It isn't so nerve-wracking, not when she knows they are all people coming from the other direction – from cities in the valley. It's kind of nice, even, to step outside and hear their chatter and camera-phone clicks. The lighthouse is spinning up on the hilltop, dull in the daylight.  
  
Alex takes her seat on the ledge again. Today there is a crow in the treetops across from her, lingering close-by in case someone with a sandwich is feeling generous. She wordlessly points it out to Jonas as he sits down beside her, and they grin.

“My vote,” Jonas tells her, “is summer here, fall there. Don't want to miss the beach in the summer.”  
  
“Camena's beach isn't gonna be as great as other places, even in the summer. It's pretty much just... This.” Windy and grey. Playing in the Oregon waves is an act of rebellion to the season. No matter the season. “Would be nice to go to Los Angeles. See the beach there. It's actually hot. The water gets warm.”

“Nice as that sounds, I think it's a little out of financial aid's budget.”

They stay for a long while, watching cars come and go. Mostly groups of young women that look like they could be her classmates, or old women who look like they could be her grandmother. Not much in between. Alex likes listening to them.

A group of girls talk about the two puppies yapping after them in the car, about letting them run free when they get down to the sand. An old woman insists to her husband that they have stayed at the Oregon House lodge once before, while he insists she must have dreamed it. (Alex inclined to believe the husband. She has never seen the sign say anything but _closed_.) A pair of girls are talking about ex-boyfriends. Later, a pair of boys share sandwiches and tear up the crusts for the crow and seagulls.  
  
Jonas smokes through Alex's silence. She has noticed that he doesn't smoke as often as most smokers she is used to. When he is nervous, mostly. Or when he is particularly relaxed. (It is still an addiction, of course. She has also seen him grow fidgety trying to go without.)  
  
Smoke and salt water.  
  
He turns to her to say something; she kisses him instead.

Smoke and salt water, and a split second of silence from all the ghosts in her hear before: _love, love, love_.  
  
***  
  
Things are tense at home, but it can't last forever. Her flight back to New York is from a shoe-box sized airport much closer to Camena than Portland. Alex still feels too skeeved out to kiss Jonas in front of her mother, but holds his hand for a long moment before letting their fingers drift apart. She hugs her mother good-bye again, and this time no one cries.

Then she is back on a plane. There is short a layover in Los Angeles again. It's nice to stretch, but after a quick walk she curls up in a seat and tries to nap until the next flight.  
  
She wakes up to her phone ringing, and blearily answers without looking. Her surroundings are as foreign to her as if they were a dream, bustling and mumbling, brightly lit and full of other travelers. “Uh... Hello?”  
  
It takes a moment for the familiar voice to reply. “Hey. Just thought I'd say bye. And thanks, one more time.”  
  
The sound of his voice should snap her awake. Instead it just feels all the more natural in her exhaustion. “Justin?”  
  
He laughs. When she looks at her phone screen, there is no 'from' number on display. “Yeah. I... I don't know. I picked your signal up. Your phone. It used to be mine – I mean, I used to be... In it. Maybe that's why.”  
  
_It's the waves_ , the ghosts tell her, with a clarity to oppose her drowsiness.  
  
“Ah,” Alex manages. She tries to straighten up in her seat, tries to wake up. She blinks rapidly. “So, you're still here?”  
  
“I'm leaving. Now.”  
  
She isn't exactly sure how to process this. “Oh. Um... Was your visit good?”  
  
The line is silent, like Justin does not know how to answer that. Alex doesn't blame him. She lets him sit, quiet in her phone for a moment longer. “I'm hoping,” he says, eventually, “to reincarnate as something bad-ass. Like an alligator.”  
  
“Sounds like a plan,” Alex says. And then she laughs, and half-way through it she can hear the stark silence of the line, the sudden cut-off of white-noise. More jarringly, she can feel the way he is gone. Like a sudden jagged slice, like a fracture, like her phone screen has shattered against her cheek. He isn't in the waves of her phone and he isn't – anywhere.  
  
He isn't anywhere.  
  
“Justin?”  
  
She waits for a moment, but knows he's left. Maybe he wanted to end on a good note. Before she even finished laughing. She ends the call, slips her phone back into her pocket, and waits for her flight to board before sleeping once more.  
  
Alex dreams of being in the time loop one more time. She dreams of dark, dark, three am forests in the fog. She dreams of ruling them, with crimson eyes and time in her hands. She dreams of not knowing any of her friends, dreams of them growing up and growing old without her. Missing her while she does not miss them.

When she wakes to deboard she still feels out of it.

While she was in the rift – until she looped it back, until she rewound it to reinsert herself into the world – she knows that they moved on without her. That she never existed. Like the world without Clarissa, they had lived in a world that never knew Alex.  
  
She wonders if Michael was alive, or if the world without Alex somehow killed him anyway. No matter how she looks at it, it isn't a comfort.  
  
Seeing Clarissa is, and they grab lunch together at a cafe near campus. One of the types Clarissa likes – full of pretty boys with journals and fashionable girls nibbling scones. The type with aged staff instead of young, with drinks served in pretty cups with ornate golden swirls instead of paper mugs.

Alex tells her about the dream, though she avoids mentioning parallels with the vision of worlds after the rift. Clarissa doesn't need to know that her sacrifice was ever on the table. Not even once, not even knowing it was an eternal loop. The version she gets is what Alex dreamed and that is all.  
  
“Oh, like that would happen,” Clarissa dismisses her, immediately. “You know Ren and Jonas would be clamoring back to the island to save you, somehow. They'd just know. God, I bet even Nona would be all gung-ho about doing the right thing.”  
  
Alex snickers at this. “And you?”  
  
“I'd leave you in an instant,” Clarissa says. Alex isn't really sure if she's joking or just honest. It's not like they got along so well, even after the island. Not at first.  
  
“Nona would make you come help.”  
  
“Ha. Yeah, she can boss me around when she wants.”  
  
“Only because she never wants to.”

“True.”  
  
“Ren said you might visit them for the summer?”  
  
“What a little gossip.”  
  
***  
  
Alex dreams of the island again, dozing off with her over-heating cell phone still in her hand. She dreams that she is walking barefoot along the sandy beaches at night, the radio gripped loosely in her other. The sand is cool in the night, and the sound of the waves roars in her ears.  
  
Her radio is whisper-quiet. She twists the radio's dial. She picks up Morse code. She picks up unintelligible clips of tv shows. She picks up Clarissa, muffled behind crinkling paper bags. “Facebook says you were online four hours ago, why the _fuck_ did you stay up so late? Alex. Open up. I brought you garbage food. And coffee.”  
  
She hears a sound that is surely meant to be her own response through a closed door, but can't make it out. More bags rustling as if the receiver had been pressed up against them, and the thud of Clarissa's impatient kick to the door. “Alexandra, you open this door or I am eating your breakfast, getting fat, and resenting you for it!”  
  
The recording stops. Static. Then it loops. Paper bags and complaining.  
  
Alex walks. Their fire is burning on the beach. The fireworks going off are new. The sound of them is a million miles away, matched by ocean-waves and shifting sand. All the sounds are leveling out, blurring together. Then creaking wooden steps up to the Addler house, the splintering wood bending under her bare feet. “You open this door,” Clarissa is saying again.  
  
She twists the dial again.  
  
“Say yes to everything,” Michael says.  
  
Alex lingers at the gates to listen, but this recording cuts off abruptly and doesn't loop, like it playing was a mistake caught just a moment too late. Like a correction, it plays something else, something new.  
Michael is distant. “When did you start to believe in ghosts, Alex?”  
  
“That night,” Alex's voice answers, muffled. “On the island.”  
  
Michael hums like he doesn't believe her.  
  
Alex shuts the radio off. She knows in the back of her mind that these could go on forever. A clip show of nonsense from her life and from her brain. Puppet shows of what she wants to hear from Michael's mouth as if it's his responsibility to play her conscience.  
  
Maybe she wants reassurance on something. Maybe it's all meaningless.  
  
The door to Maggie Addler's house leads her to the inside of the lighthouse, where suddenly it is not her radio she is listening attentively to, but the tour guide. She is thirteen years old and shooting impatient looks at Michael. The faceless tour guide explains the patterned flashes, the different timing of each lighthouse. She remembers this.  
  
The visitors are all people she knows. Old classmates, cashiers she sees all the time, college teachers. Jonas bumps shoulders with her to catch her attention, and very suddenly he is the one she is here with. Michael is still beside her, completely enraptured by the tour, but as distant as any of the others.  
  
“Hey,” Jonas says. He is still nineteen and has to look down at her, and smiles as if even in the dream he knows this and is amused by it.  
  
“Hey,” Alex echoes, but wakes up immediately after.  
  
Her phone is still in her hand, finally cooled, but low on battery. Four in the morning. A text from Jonas from an hour ago complains that he can't sleep. Then that he misses her. Then _sorry that's dumb ignore that, uhhhhhhh sleep good.  
  
_ Sometimes Alex wonders if her dreams are so easy to interpret because of the ghosts. Like they are sorting out her thoughts and feelings and memories for her instead of just her subconscious.  
  
She likes the dreams where she can see Michael. They hurt, but it's a comfort even so. It just sucks that it isn't _real_. It isn't like she is visiting him and then they have to part ways, not like those ripples on the island. It is just her brain pulling up his image, making him say whatever she wants to hear.  
  
The solid fact that she will never see him again is so, so heavy. And sure, she doesn't cry on her bedroom floor about it anymore, but it doesn't really hurt _less_ , either.  
  
She reads and re-reads the text messages from Jonas. They make her feel a bit better, and if that's as good as it gets then – maybe that's okay. Maybe she can handle that. His embarrassed backpedaling is endearing, and she likes the idea of him reaching out for her company.  
  
Maybe it's okay to reach out to him sometimes, too. For once.  
  
He answers after two rings, his voice low and full of sleep.  
  
He slurs her name, “Alex?”  
  
“Hi, uh. Sorry. You sleeping?”  
  
“No,” he lies, completely transparent.  
  
She snorts, then lets the line stay silent for a moment. She hears the familiar creak of his bed as he readjusts. She misses him too. “Sorry to like – dump this on you after waking you up, but... I don't know. I had a dream.”  
  
“It's fine. What sort?”  
  
“The island. And Michael. And you.”  
  
“Yeah?”  
  
“Yeah, I was... Walking on the beach and the radio was playing, just, random stuff. Clips of conversations. And then I went up to the Addler house, but inside it was the lighthouse tour with Michael. And then you were there with us.”  
  
“Weird,” Jonas says. After a yawn he adds, quietly, “it would have been cool to meet him.”  
  
Alex thinks again of the world she could create right now if she wanted to, _really_ wanted to. She could go back and do it all. The urge is quieter than it used to be. A lot of things are.  
  
“I still have dreams about my mom sometimes,” Jonas offers in the silence. “Mostly just normal stuff. Like getting ready for school and she's reading on the couch when I leave. Or visiting at the hospital.”  
  
Sometimes Alex forgets. And this is fucked up, she thinks, but true. She forgets that between all the dead people inside of her and the dead she had to leave behind that she is not the only one. He handles it a whole lot better than her. She wonders if she should be grateful that he hasn't called her out on this.  
  
“Yeah. I feel like most of my dreams with Michael are pretty plain.”  
  
“... You alright?”  
  
Alex wonders how many times he has to check on her like this. “Yeah. Just thinking.” She pauses, but not long enough to make him ask. The full thought is: _I'm sad, Jonas, and I don't think it ever goes away, but sometimes things are pretty good._ She only says, “things are pretty good.”  
  
“School is hard and the future is a nightmare, but, I mean. It's almost Summer, and I'll get to see you again, soon, so. Yeah. Couldn't be better.”  
  
She laughs, and lets the sleepy quiet take over again. It's too late for this. “My phone's dying, so I'll let you get back to sleep.”  
  
“If you're sure.”  
  
“Yeah. Talk soon, though?”  
  
“'Course.”  
  
Alex hangs up. The crash of loneliness is instant, but but as brief as always.

She knows that she will see Jonas soon, and get to lay down to sleep beside him. Knows they'll do boring lighthouse tours just to whisper about what ghosts she can feel, that they'll play in the icy waves with wind-tangled hair. That someday they'll get away from that tiny city and go somewhere no one knows them, that they'll run away and be stupid and see how it works, and this time she isn't just latching on to what Michael wanted – this time she wants it.  
  
She knows that Ren will send her a thousand selfies and candids of Nona and Clarissa from her visit. She knows she will miss everyone terribly for every time they are apart, even as those stretches get longer and longer the more they grow up. But she knows they will not ever be apart forever.

And she knows she is never really going to be alone. Her ghosts lay with her in her bed, sleepy and comfortable, and as much a part of her as her grief and her love.  
  
 

**Author's Note:**

> Shoujo bullshit, bullshit ghost magic, and trying to cope with death. It turns out you can't write catharsis for stuff you aren't over yet. Sorry. 
> 
> Anyway, there was originally like 20k more words with a fuckton of OCs and leading Alex into her inevitable ghost hunter adventuring future with Jonas, but I think I just decided that the implication is enough and that none of it was really the point.


End file.
